Firefox is literally the only program of any kind that I can think of that even supports MRU Ctrl+Tab. Windowed UIs, sure, MRU is conventional, but tabbed?
Chrome uses an alternative tab workflow brought up by alt/cmd+shift+a which will bring up a list of tabs in last used order. You can then navigate via keyboard or just type to search tabs.
That doesn't explain why the other method isn't at least an option in Chrome but I figured it was worth mentioning for those that missed the functionality.
Huh, you’re the first person I’ve encountered liking that behaviour. Since Firefox switched to MRU Ctrl+Tab by default, every Firefox user I know (whether a long-time user, one migrating from another browser, or someone for whom it is their first browser by virtue of their youth, and I have at least one in each category) has successfully found and toggled that option.
I must admit, however, that I do have Tab Flip for Tree Style Tab, with Shift+F2 to switch between the current and most recently selected tabs (like Ctrl+6 in Vim to toggle between the most recent buffers), and have added similar elsewhere, with Meta+F2 to switch between most recent workspaces in the Sway or i3 window managers:
I wouldn’t want to be without at least this single-level MRU in my browser or window manager. (On more traditional window managers, you normally have Alt+Tab or ⌘⇥ and ⌘` which are all some form of more extensive MRU list, though I find macOS’s application-level treatment bizarre and extraordinarily frustrating because of how cripplingly limiting it is if you work with multiple multi-window apps and want to see a window of each. And yeah, it’s easy to see when reflecting on Alt+Tab why Firefox went the way they did with Ctrl+Tab, making it behave similarly. But I haven’t previously found anyone actually liking it.)
Right now, I have 258 tabs open in my main window, of which I’m actively using at least a dozen, and will use another few dozen within a day or so. (Probably should go through and clean out a hundred or two.) Most of my family is some degree of tab hoarder as well (my eldest sister regularly has over a thousand tabs spread across a few windows).
Get the "tab stash" extension, you can stash your tabs instead of nuking them. That way you can go back a few months and find things that would be tougher to find through history or other means.
Yet another tab management (YATM) recommendation here. I use the OneTab extension to help me manage tabs. In a recent update, they added the ability to:
A) name tab groups;
B) lock specific groups which mimics the capability of bookmark folders (clicking a link doesn’t remove it from the group).
The extension has helped me reduce the number of open windows on my laptop, among other productivity improvements.
I used to do this too, then I got a bookmark save service (Pocket). Now whenever I see something that I have the reaction of keeping the tab around, I just save it and close it instead. Makes browsing lighter. I do still have around 20 tabs open normally, mostly things that don't fit in the "bookmark save" workflow, but definitely better than the 100+ tabs it used to be before.
Huh, this is the first time I heard that FF supports MRU, and it's amazing (well except that it's only current window, see below)! I don't know why it was turned off by default.
MRU should always be the default, this is also what IDE's do, and alt+tab does with main windows.
What is even the point of ctrl+tab cycling to next tab? You got to press it dozens of times to go back to the original tab... Why would anyone use that? You can use ctrl+pgdn and pgup to go to next/previous which is more sensible for this.
So disappointingly, now I turned this feature on in FF, and I'm disappointed to see that it only cycles through most recent tab of current window. I wish it would go through any window. I have always dozens of windows with dozens of tabs each, and I find myself sometimes just opening the same URL again due to not bothering trying to find back a tab I was in just a few minutes ago due to not having a ctrl+tab that goes to most recent tab in any window.
ctrl+tab cycling to the next tab is essential for many ways of surfing the web.
For instance, research a topic and tap up many tabs. Now go through them one by one. And in the process of doing so you might want to tab up even more.
At this point cycling to the next tab becomes a way to navigate the history, but where you have the context of each step preserved. MRU in this context is a nightmare.
MRU for tabs doesn't make any sense to me, that purpose is served by switching to another window instead (which is, and should be, MRU).
But ctrl+pgdn already goes to next tab, so ctrl+tab doesn't need to do that same thing, MRU is what multi-document programs (like text editors with multiple open files, IDE's) usually do for ctrl+tab. And this for good reason: this allows to cycle through the most recent documents the easiest, following usage patterns. This usage pattern also applies to browsers (and as said, ctrl+pgup/pgdn already do prev/next tab for the other usage pattern)
finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
ctrl+pgdn is a two-handed operation, doa. The use-case for a browser and IDEs etc. is vastly different.
>finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
not at all, they are ordered and you already know the direction you want to go. Unlike MRU that breaks down completely after a few tabs.
They're not ordered for me, any tab could be anywhere and many tabs can exist for many contexts from different moments of time that can be relevant again at any future time. How do you get the magical ability to have the tabs in the exact order you need them and have to go in only one direction?
> Because that's how you open them. Which is the relevant context you need.
Opening multiple tabs from one place, and then going through them exactly in that order, is just not something that happens often for me.
> As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Not at all. Imagine you were reading some document in some tab. This tab could be in any window, on any workspace.
Now you check your email in-between, which is another tab in another window.
Now after checking your email, you want to go back to the document you were reading: try finding it back amongst all windows across all desktops, possibly not anymore the front tab because you also just opened a link from the document, or instinctively opened the discord tab of the window the document was in or paused some youtube music that was playing, or whatever!
MRU solves that perfectly. We're talking about 100s of tabs across multiple windows here. With MRU you only have to go through maybe max 10 or so, which is easy to find the document back in.
Funny enough, for me it's extremely uncomfortable when tab cycling doesn't represent the tab order I see on screen. I've always disable that feature and even have code to autodisable it on new installs
The benefit of MRU order is that you can use it blindly to go to the last-nth tab without having to eye-coordinate with the contents of the tab bar. It becomes an automatic muscle-memory thing.
Usually less than a dozen, though I don’t quite see the relevance. I use MRU to switch between two to four (rarely more) related tabs.
In code editors I often have several dozens of tabs open, and MRU is a crucial usability feature when coding, so I’d say that its usefulness is independent of the number of open tabs.
I really had to go and disable that. I use a lot of tabs, I switch between them often, and a few of them stay open for a while
I have tree style tabs so my tabs are all already ordered in a vaguely meaningful way, but the recent use order of my last tabs is completely unpredictable to me!
With this feature on ^tab might as well be random for how badly it confuses me.. I'm so glad Mozilla hadn't removed the opt-out yet.
I’m a Firefox user but I’m not sure that I can agree that it’s lighter than Google Chrome. I think Chrome is generally faster at everything.
Chrome is also more stable. For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
But on principle I use Firefox whenever possible. I appreciate the effort that went into it. Still have to use Chrome daily for one or two business web apps that block FF.
Chrome is possibly faster for 10 tabs or less. When you go upwards of 100 like I do... It's not even in the competition. Its UI becomes terrible and its unresponsive. FF keeps chugging along without missing a beat.
Odd. I've been on Mac for more than a decade so no idea. Notice that this only became a thing with Quantum so if you used an older version of FF it wouldn't apply.
I'm with the GP on this: FF is unstable with lots of tabs. It's a big memory hog, and it's been like this for about 2 years in my experience so far. I'm using a Mac with 16GB RAM, and it's not enough for Firefox any more (something changed, it used to use less memory). Using current FF (103.0b9). Lot of tabs, but auto tab-unloading so there shouldn't be a large number active.
Reported memory use (in Activity Monitor) varies, 8GB-25GB, and it's often swapping. Sometimes it uses more, and then the system crashes. Often it fills my remaining 20GB of free disk space for swap space. Surprisingly, even opening HN pages and only following HN links (i.e. all text-only), the memory usage grows in this way over time.
It's not possible to scroll smoothly or type a comment like this without pauses and occasional spinning beach balls. Just scrolling through a page with two-finger drag, it will stop every 10 seconds or so, then jump forwawrd. Moving the cursor with the cursor keys in this comment window is similar.
The constant jank and pauses may be entirely due to memory swapping or some other garbage-collection like overhead, I have no way to know.
What other people write about this issue is that it's likely some combination of number of tabs, and the fact that modern pages need a lot of memory for large images, compositing and similar, and perhaps memory used by add-ons. But all of this has suggestive evidence against it: If I go to about:memory and click "Minimize memory usage", it consistently brings memory usage down to not much more than when Firefox starts up, without appearing to change any functionality or deactivate any tabs; and when it starts up it's using less than 8GB despite loading up the same session. It also does this itself spontaneously from time to time, though not reliably enough.
That said, I switched from Safari when I realised Safari was also being a memory hog and was causing everything else on the laptop to be slow. At the time I switched, Firefox was a lovely breath of fresh air in that department. Even though I copied over all my tabs from Safari (by hand), Firefox ran in very much less RAM, and life was good again on the laptop.
Something has changed since then, making Firefox much worse for memory usage, and I don't yet know what it is.
I think this is due to specific sites. I try to avoid Google Docs and have a separate instance of Chrome only for that. I updated to the M1 Max with 64gb so even if FF slowed down at some point I wouldn't know at this point. But it was OK on my previous air which was pretty weak.
"about:performance" does not show any pages or add-ons being memory hogs. The memory use per page that it shows is surprisingly small, and the total comes to < 1GB.
And I see the real memory usage grown, eventually to crashing size, even when I'm just reading around HN, clicking many article headings and comments but remaining within the HN text-only site.
I agree it's probably made worse caused by specific sites, but I haven't been able to figure out which ones, or perhaps it's wide range of them, which defeats browsing in general. However, I now avoid Telegram Web, because that does consistently crash Firefox for me eventually (I've seen reported memory use grow to 67GB when TW was open, about three times).
Whatever it is, it doesn't look like site JavaScript holding data in large JavaScript objects or DOM trees, because minimizing memory use with "about:memory" reduces the size to workable levels without any other observable effect on open pages.
So I'm inclined to think of the Firefox as having a severe reclaimable-but-not-reclaimed memory leak or cache problem of some kind, that is outside the world of JavaScript data.
Oddly, I also use FF on a 16GB Mac and experience none of those slowdowns that you mention. On my work machine, FF typically has around 100 tabs grouped into 4-6 tab groups by project and it is solid.
I do find that some websites end up using 1GB+ of memory if you leave them running for an extended period of time (looking at you MacRumors forums) but that happens on Safari and Chrome, too. HN is usually the safest one that uses the least memory. Sites with lots of ads load all kinds of crap and can use surprising amounts of memory.
I vaguely remember reading a discussion about how much memory Firefox should use to optimize performance. Some ppl wanted it to just use everything while others wanted a memory footprint as small as possible. I think they went with a percentage of available memory, an idea neither side liked. (hah)
An anecdote about the jank and pauses: I have... many (D:) tabs open in Chrome right now, and I discovered that setting Session Buddy to show the number of tabs in its icon causes the entire browser to pause for a fraction of a second every 1-2 seconds. Clearly this is because Session Buddy is calling the "get list of open tabs" API method, which for all I know is using a global mutex that is held for as long as it takes the browser process to get and build the tab list. Perhaps something similar is happening in Firefox. Try doing the whole nuke-profile-from-orbit thing, remove all extensions, reset all the settings, etc (after backing the profile up sufficiently to be able to put it all back). It might be some obscure option or configuration flag. Given the low number of tabs it's not likely to be that.
For what is worth: On my windows Chrome just freezes everything under 10-20 tab load. Firefox just works with hundreds of tabs not rebooting for months.
With that many tabs I can't get either to work well, tbh. OTOH, FF has an _apparent_ speed advantage for me in that it crashes pretty regularly so I'm not having to worry about memory leaks. =\",
Same here, I also get frequent crashes on FF. In the past it used to crash when selecting text with the mouse, but since the latest update that seems to have been fixed. Now it tends to crash when drag&dropping things instead.
I could never figure out any consistent action to cause it; it would be there, then it would not. Often when doing nothing. Could be some confluence of extensions I have, too.
I've been using firefox for the last 2-3 years, and I've had it 'crash' 2 times, both on youtube, but that might be because of all the privacy related addons I have. Ublock origin reports more than 2k blocked scripts on youtube.
Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.
I'd consider faster as a different thing than lighter. I think benchmarks show that the JS engine in Chrome is faster, but you pay a price in memory and processor to get that.
Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.
This is what keeps me away from Firefox. I gave it a try for 3 months a little while back but it was so much slower than Chrome for general browsing. Maybe I'm due another try.
It was after all the press about quantum that I last gave FireFox a go and was disappointed. Still, I'm willing to try again - I'd like to do what I can to prevent another browser monopoly.
Within the past couple years I've went from Chrome to Edge, then to Firefox, and on to LibreWolf. Edge is probably my favourite of the bunch, and I think the CSS devtools are a lot nicer in it, but I just want to keep my stuff as independent as possible etc.
> For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.
I'm a big fan of Firefox containers. I occasionally need different logins for the same sites and containers make that much easier than Google's profile feature.
Containers is the big thing imho. Having two bookmarks that go to different Gmail accounts, with each opening in a different container tab, and each container being logged into just that account. Same for AWS accounts.
Is the purpose of using two bookmarks to open the container and gmail simultaneously? I just use one bookmark, two containers, each is only logged on to one gmail account.
One bookmark opens one account, the other opens the other account. I use an extension to match URLs to containers. So it's possible to have bookmarks "gmail [work]" and "gmail [personal]" that open in the right container, already authenticated.
Are extensions and their settings shared across all containers?
One thing I love about Chrome/Edge profiles is being able to different extensions enabled/disabled and configured differently across them.
For example, I have a "private" profile that always runs windscribe vpn and other privacy-heavy extensions that I might not necessarily want running on my "base" profile.
A lot of stuff is loaded from the same host as the content. For example, a DNS blocking solution like NextDNS can't block YouTube ads without breaking the videos (same with ads on Google Search and many other sites). It also can't apply cosmetic filters to block things like cookies popups or hide empty spots where ads are supposed to be displayed.
DNS blocking is better than nothing, but it's very basic when compared to a browser extension like uBlock Origin.
I think crypto in general is disastrous for our environment right now, and has offered none of the self-control finance benefits it promised due to ever more regulation (the EU is soon planning to ban private wallets, you can only legally host money on exchanges then, which basically means we're full circle to the old banking system). All this has been precipitated by the frantic speculators looking for a quick buck. Bitcoin wasn't invented to enable money-hoarding investors, it was designed to undermine the old banking system and give us back full control over our money. This aspect has been completely undermined by regulation now.
But BAT is a different beast as it doesn't use mining. So my concern is not the same as for general crypto schemes.
It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers. I just want the advertising industry to die and get out from between the content creators and consumers. I know this is not a realistic viewpoint but I'm not willing to contribute to it. Brave solves the privacy problem to some extent but not the ad problem. And in a way they even promote ads by paying users to view them.
Brave seems to be looking to make the current system more palatable (and of course become the gatekeeper for this new tech which would be priceless if it ever took off). I've long given up on the ad system completely. I already pay for the sites I like and use a lot (at least where they offer this option) but I don't make any exception for adblocking ever. Even when they're non-tracked.
>the EU is soon planning to ban private wallets, you can only legally host money on exchanges then, which basically means we're full circle to the old banking system
They can try to "ban" whatever they want, but it's not happening.
> It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers.
The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks. The fact is that it's the simplest way for content providers to generate revenue, and that won't change overnight. What BAT is attempting to do is establish a market between content consumers and providers. The BAT wallet is funded either by attention, i.e. consuming ads, or by directly purchasing BAT. In that sense, the advertising middle-man could eventually be removed from the transaction.
Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects. We also need them to be friendly for content providers to integrate in order to boost adoption.
> The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks.
I agree, but it's not like I can't wish for it :)
> Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects.
I don't like being told how I should feel about something :) I don't celebrate them and I won't. For me the solution is ever more and ever more efficient adblockers, as well as bans on tracking like the EU is doing. This is something that does really work. Many sites are really seeing a drop in income from ads and are looking for alternatives now. Hurting someone in their wallet really works.
I think BAT is a dead-end, they don't have the market power to bring about this change, and the ideal outcome is only one of the possible ones around. Seeing as how you really do celebrate their solution but still don't use it illustrates the issue I see with it.
Aside from some of the common critiques of purpose-oriented blockchain tech, I think there's a question with BAT of if creating a token-based ecosystem with this thing actually creates economic incentives that align with the overall improvement of our society, or if it merely contributes to the existing problems that have enabled intrusive ad tech in the first place.
On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.
How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.
I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.
But we have all this today. Just install an adblocker. Ads are hardly pervasive at all for me, I really rarely see them unless I go out on the street. On the internet adblocking is almost 100% effective and I don't watch live TV.
In fact I see people who are more wealthy not using adblockers and paywall bypassers because they feel like they should support the sites somehow. It's a similar thing with downloading video content, many of my better-off friends are not downloading because they are worried about content disappearing. They actually care about the overall economic model working. My friends from worse circumstances (I know many people in lesser-off countries) don't give a shit about that and download all they can get. And I agree with them.
I myself don't have this worry. Content will never disappear one way or another. We had content on the internet before ads were really a thing and it was better than it is now in many ways. And I like cutting into the big megacorps' profits.
You don't actually need Decentraleyes or Privacy Badger now that Firefox has total cookie protection and that uBlock Origin supports their other features (some via lists). Arkenfox has a useful write-up on this: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions.
I only have four extensions now: uBlock Origin, I Don't Care About Cookies, one for user agent switching, and one for removing HTML elements via the context menu.
I don't get the extensions part. All of them apart from the containers (that's a browser or more like engine specific behavior) are available for Chrome so they are not FF-only. Most of them are "over the top" if you start with uBlock Origin too. Like you don't need multiple extensions to do the same thing > most of the time that leads to broken sites. uBlock Origin on its own is incredibly powerful. Last but not least HTTPS Everywhere is also obsolete because you can force any browsers now to open sites with HTTPS only, you don't need it that anymore. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/09/https-actually-everywh...
And no offense if TechRadar is writing articles like this... they should open their own site without any of the extensions and watch the ads, popups, autoplay videos and such. Maybe they will notice the problem doesn't start with the browser of your choice.
The article specifically talks "of Google breaking those AdBlock extensions in 2023 with a massive update, which is rather terrifying, to say the least." What is referenced here is Manifest V3. Gorhill, uBlock Origin developer, agrees that this will significantly limit uBlock Origin on Chrome.
Every feature removed by Google will have to be maintained by the open source community instead. That's going to be a workload that I'm not sure who is going to pick up. After all Chromium right now is maintained by Google. There's some forks like degoogled chromium but they are mainly focused on removing features, not rebuilding ones that have been deprecated.
Brave is an option but I don't really like where they're heading with their crypto tokens.
Yeah you can bet that Google will do anything they can to stop adblockers once their FLoC replacement is online. After all, in their view they have solved the "privacy problem".
Chrome is only going downhill from now. So is Edge, Microsoft has already at the stage where they don't prioritise user experience and appeal anymore and are priorising monetisation. Like with the "buy now and pay later" scams they're including. It's IE4 all over again, once they arrive at the desired marketshare the user is just a dumb sheep to them again.
Unfortunately Mozilla is far from perfect, they're becoming too corporate and weaseling in monetisation schemes totally in conflict with their goals. But they're still a world better.
Can you elaborate on the Mozilla corporate weasel part? As far as I can tell, they are just a) poorly managed and b) desperately trying to diversify revenue away from search prioritization contracts.
True but they are looking in all the wrong places. Including pocket "featured headlines", vpn services that are just a resell, just lowhanging fruit that does nothing but annoy the users that still care about them.
Meanwhile they try to make the browser as mainstream friendly, not understanding that the mainstream has long given up on them and they only have the last remaining bastion of hardcore privacy users left. Whose user patterns they're not seeing because they focus too much on telemetry.
I think since they became Mozilla Inc they started thinking like big tech and are slowly becoming just like it. But because their foundation origins the declining marketshare is not ringing their alarm bells like they, in a real company, would.
If they really wanted to diversify and get me to pay for something, they have to do more than just resell mullvad. I'm a mullvad user but I much rather pay for that directly as it gives me a lot more features. I love mullvad but I want to use it in more than just a browser.
What I'd want to see and would pay for:
- A service like Apple's iCloud Private Relay that really makes browsing more anonymous (rather than a basic VPN which they offer now, that's too little too late).
- Paid Sync storage (with full E2E so I have no reason to self-host)
- An archiving service of webpages (also E2E). Because onenote sucks more and more
Basically things other than 'quick wins' but that need some serious vision and development. Right now they're thinking way too much like a lazy CEO, doing a quick tie-in with another service hoping for some takeup or some cheap marketing benefit.
If they want to diversify and get people to pay they really have to offer some real benefits that are a gap in the market. Those exist but they need some more work than just a quick joint marketing effort.
They're also more frequently updated on Chrome, and smell less like malware. The Firefox addon directory is a hellhole. The only place where Chrome fails on this is on uBlock, but that's completely intentional because they're an ad company.
The only thing I really hate about firefox is the build.
Building FF from scratch is a fucking nightmare.
It's the only shitty package that REQUIRES python 2 for building.
That information is outdated; I build FF from source a couple of times a week, and use python3.9 for mach's python. I do agree the build is special needs, made worse by all the rust, but of the things I really hate about Firefox, the build is pretty low on that list
The Chromium (and its derivatives) builds makes it clear they have a compile farm of unlimited compute and ram, so it's just "which kind of bad" I nowadays, I guess
Browsers seem to require an order of magnitude more effort to package than is typical that distros occasionally struggle to keep up. It's the only software in which I use upstream binaries out of preference. I assume it's a safer bet from a security and/or performance perspective.
I should be clear. What I was referring to when I said `keybindings` is browser/developer keybindings that are not yet made configurable.
There's been an open issue for 7 years asking for a shortcut key for the eyedropper[0]. The navigation between developer panels is also a bit tedious. The page focus key, F6, is not configurable.
These are some instances I was thinking when I said I wanted good keybinding support. I'll be really willing to try an extension that achieves these but it's really the browser's job.
With that said, I've tried a bunch of these extensions in the past! I'm not a vim guy so I settled with Link Hints[1] for in-page navigation. I cannot recommend it enough for non-vim guys. It's really underrated.
Thanks for the mention of F6, I had been looking for a page focus key for a while to restore focus after switching to the address bar.
I've discovered that "ctrl-f esc" also works; focus goes back to the page when the search bar closes. Convenient if you have capslock remapped to escape.
You can hide the tab bar through userstyles css. It can't be done from Firefox itself unfortunately, but once you set it up you never have to do it again.
When I saw the title of this article, I assumed it had to be about Tree Style Tags. No other browser feature has so immediately become a feature I must have so quickly.
Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands
It's pretty much the only reason I'm staying with Firefox. Mozilla has pissed me off often enough for me to attempt to jump ship, but there's just nowhere to go.
(I'm aware of Orion, but when I last used it I found it to still have performance and polish issues)
TST is literally the killer feature for FF. It's actually the only reason I went to FF, it was getting out of hand to have all my tabs across the top, and it makes little sense with modern screens being so wide that giving up a little horizontal space to get legible titles is absolutely worth it.
Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.
I never got to leverage TST, something about the UX bothers me. I have better flow with Tab Stash. Also TST suffers with my hoarding habits and the subtree features have bare naked UI.
From the extension description, Tab Stash seems to save all open tabs as bookmarks. But this feature is already built into Firefox. Am I missing something? I’ve never used either of these extensions (will be trying out TST) so forgive my ignorance if I’m missing something obvious!
Me too. I was a long time TST user but I found I am more productive if I use stashes instead, pin the ones I use daily, and try to only keep what needs to be open in a native tab.
TST might be niche but the concept of a tab in general is not something only understood by technically savvy people. We’re not in the era of IE6 anymore.
Which raises the question: why would FF sabotage it? Why isn't it easy to hide the default tabs, and why does the sidebar have the name of the extension providing it stuck at the top?
They had all of the warning in the world about how important this extension was to people years before finally removing XUL, half a decade later you still can only repair the display problems through CSS that isn't kept consistent from version to version, and feature requests/bug reports on the issue are filled with antagonism from the project.
A "killer feature" is a phrase with its own meaning so we can treat it as an atom and apply modifiers to it. The order of operations matters, and I posit that the OP placed their imaginary parentheses as I did in my first example.
No. There is no such thing as a "literally killer feature" unless it is some feature that can cause death. A killer feature in this case is exclusively figurative and adding "literally" is wrong to do.
> Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned.
Easy, most people never use more than five or six tabs because it’s annoying to have more. TST is a solution to a marginal use case so no one invests the time into developing it.
Am I doing something wrong? Every time I try to move something into a group, it just gets deselected and I have to select them again and then sometimes it works to move into a group.
And Tree Tabs felt like a better Tree Style Tabs (but there were no bugfixes in past 4 years).
Though very rarely Sideberry looses/forgets the tree structure of tabs, and I have to restore it from one of the recent snapshots (which it creates every day automatically).
I've tried to switch from TST to Sidebery twice and both times hit small but bad bugs (restore not working on browser restart) and went back to TST. It's simultaneously slicker but buggier. It looks like Sidebery is still under development though: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues
People hate the UI. It was clean before the transition to webextensions, now it's messy and can only be fixed through futzing with userChrome.css (with no help from mozilla.)
If you like my garish and ugly theme, it is TST friendly (it will theme the TST tabs as long as you pick the "Photon" TST theme in the TST settings): https://alan.norbauer.com/projects/alanglow
You need to use userChrome.css (that's what I do and it works great). it's a bit of a hidden feature, I hope they expose it to extensions eventually, maybe with a different API
> I'm looking for a way to have the tab bar hidden.
That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.
I find multi-account-containers* incredibly useful re: tab groups. Coupled with a few pinned tabs (email), I generally always know where to look for what when I have the browser open.
What do you dislike about tab groups? Or is Chrome's implementation on mobile not good?
I think the current design is ugly. The way Edge handles them in the vertical tabs sidebar looks a lot better than the way other Chromium derivatives handle them in the tab strip, but still not the best. I like Vivaldi's implementation better, but the UI is relatively laggy. I miss old Opera.
I find them unpredictable. I don't know when something will open in a new group, I don't know how I can move a tab out of/into a group. I find it to be kind of a mess. And of course it was shoved at me without even asking whether I want it.
(Thanks in advance for the solution. I mostly use Firefox anyway)
Ok, great idea. Now we just need an extension that auto-bookmarks every newly opened page until I unbookmark it, and a category of "super-bookmarks" to curate the pages I would manually bookmark now.
No. Tab groups are great, they allow you to bundle context but persist it front and center. On a given day I might be working on five different things, I context switch between tab groups, make some progress within a group, and move along. Bookmarks absolutely do not solve this issue. Bookmarks are not ephemeral, and take considerably more time to organize than simply using tabs naturally.
> Coworkers look at me like I’m a freak because I usually keep fewer than 10 tabs open :)
Haha! That's me. My maximum is 15 and then my cleanliness ghost kicks in. I said tab groups because I like organization even if it's just 10 tabs. I honestly don't know why I said tab search.
The former don't preserve login state (and site state in general) or scroll position, navigating between them requires an internet connection and often uses significant data (important when working from a metered and/or unreliable connection like on a train or plane), just to name a few differences.
I usually work on about 5 projects at a time. During a given day I will switch between those projects at least once an hour. With Panorama Tab Groups, I only see about 10-20 tabs at a time and they are all specific to the current project. when i switch, it does it all at once and the pages don’t reload. They retain their state. I can be editing something in one tab group, switch to another tab group to check on a dependency, and then switch back to the firs group to finish editing.
I do use bookmarks for longer term organization but my workspace is all handled in tab groups.
I don't use groups (I liked them when tab groups were a feature of Firefox). I search for tabs by typing stuff in the awesome bar, that works.
I always have a lot of tabs and kill everything from times to times. But it's nice to reach a tab that's already loaded when you need it, instead of reloading the page every time, making a network access, using resources and having to wait. A page being already open is also a hint that it's something I accessed recently and that it's most likely the thing I need.
I don't want to waste my time managing bookmarks (actually the sibling comment from lamacase captures my view very well on this). That's not how I use a browser. But it's good they are there for people like you who find a use for it.
Your browser has a chronological list of the previous pages you visited. It’s very easy to quickly go back to a page you had open recently and fairly easy to search for it in the history if it was some time before. It’s actually probably easier than finding a tab amongst a lot of tabs.
For persisting state, it’s simple. You don’t. History is going to send you back where you were if the url scheme is not brain dead. I will personally stop using sites which don’t do that properly because they are annoying to use.
For forms I just fill them when I need to or keep them open for a bit if I forget I would need some information which I need to check. If I realise it’s going to take some time, I just close them and fill them properly when I have all I need.
Wow, I should have read this before cadence-per-cadence making the exact same comment!
I have no idea why nobody uses bookmarks and everybody keeps hundreds of tabs open. When did that start? Who even has the RAM for that? How do you even click on them when they’re that tiny? So many things just don’t make sense.
I've never understood how people get into a workflow where they expect to have lots of persistent tabs. I rely on the fact that I can reset my browser by quitting it - everything goes away and I can start fresh, ahhh! The idea of browser state as something valuable is foreign, and it kind of makes me feel uncomfortable.
Having coworkers looking at you like you are freak while keeping your job because the company sees you as a bringer of value is the best compliment you can get from your workplace :)
I want to see extensions which change how the user interacts with the browser (eg. Vimium or gesturify) work on browser internal pages such as settings, extensions or reader view. I know its not going to happen because "security".
It definitely does with me. I used Edge when I was using Windows and I liked it!
I went back to Windows after almost 2 years for work and MS has managed to bloat it too. Don't understand why I need a Math solver. Edge bar is annoying. Favorites and bookmarks are 2 separate things?
I turned them all off obviously but defaults matter.
I went from disliking Edge, to liking it, and then slowly disliking it again as they added bloat to it.
What turned me off from it was when I lost a year's worth of (unimportant) bookmarks and history. One day I opened it up and it decided to kindly sign me in automatically (probably detected I was signed into an MS site in-browser), and it wanted to automatically sync all my history, auto-fill info and passwords to Microsoft's sync servers. I immediately disconnected my account to stop this, and then it deleted my Edge profile afterwards as a further courtesy.
I understand that these two behaviors are probably Features, but I don't like the feeling of losing control of my software. And now these features like MSFT Rewards, coupon services, credit card services, and the "Bing Bar" (or whatever you call it) are just too much for me. Not to mention every PC I use Edge on tends to assault my eyes with political propaganda since Edge's New Tab page defaults to biased news outlets.
If you mean a basic calculator in the URL bar, Firefox has that too (also a simple units converter) but off by default. They do that because people use search engines for that kind of stuff. The implementation (at least the Firefox one) is quite simple.
There is tab search (and history, and bookmarks for that matter) from the address bar (i.e. typing `% foo` will search all tabs for `foo`). I don't know if it's turned on by default, but you can set it up from “Search shortcuts” settings section.
For what it's worth, Chrome has a reader mode, just hidden behind an experimental flag, and a native PiP mode for videos, accessible with the media controls icon that appear when a video is playing.
I use Panorama Tab Groups. It lets me create groups of tabs (obviously) for each project. Each project has 10-20 tabs and I can quickly switch between them. It means that most times, I only have 10-20 tabs visible. Makes things much easier to navigate and keep track of.
Regarding tab groups, there's two things that I've found that seems to have solved my requirements:
- Workona (this is an extension for chrome)
- Arc (https://thebrowser.company/)
Both essentially have the idea of "spaces" for web browsers.
> Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
I've been using Brave for a while and I'm considering going back to FF, partly to get out of Chromium.
However, this is a point I don't get. What do I care if these features are native or plug-ins? My Brave plugins are synced, so whenever I install Brave and set it up I immediately. If the plugin is well done, there is no difference, and for people who don't care about that particular feature it could be less bloat to have it on a feature.
Specifically for the Reader mode, the Chromium Addon I use comes from the Firefox code for the same functionality, so it's just as good. Kudos to FF, OSS is awesome.
Simple Tab Groups is how tab groups should have been done in Firefox from the start. I think if they would be like that they would not have to rip them out. Tab search or rather filtering is included and is such a splendid addition. Also automatic backup of groups is a fine feature, but so far I only needed to use it for migration.
I'd like to add that it combines very nicely with Gesturefy, defining a couple of mouse gestures to switch between tab groups (either through a small popup or switching moving back/forth) is what got me to actually use the tab groups meaningfully.
This fixes most of the links on HN for me - I'm one of those people who doesn't like the browser to save anything, so every time I visit a site it's for the first time - so anyway reader mode just cuts right through all the shit in one click, no cookie banners, no subscribe banners, no interruption banners, it gets straight to the content if it's there (sometimes even cuts through shallow front end paywalls) - honestly if the site looks horrible and reader mode doesn't work, close tab - can't be arsed.
It also makes far better use of screen space than most site designs, e.g those common yet horrible headers with css position: sticky. Pretty much every big news site is made better by pulling any content into reader mode.
I wish they also had a way to search tabs without the address bar. I insist that address bars act solely as address bars so I've disabled all other features from it including search.
Even a CLI shouldn't be making internet connections automatically or unpredictably. If my terminal had the option to send my keystrokes to some sever for autocomplete suggestions (and market research) or did things like automatically append parts of URLs to what I type by guessing at what I wanted I'd disable that too.
Native reader mode is fantastic! The underlying parser (readability) works great. Shameless plug: I use Readability to parse web articles and send it directly to Kindle: https://ktool.io
I'm typing this from a desktop Firefox on PostmarketOS in Poco F1 smartphone, I love it.
Especially since I have to rely upon the browser for most 3rd party services due to the lack of a proper Linux client.
But running Firefox on Linux mobile has largely been a community effort, I wish Mozilla realizes the need-gap and invests in official Linux smartphone version.
But I'm actively moving away from 3rd party extensions in FF as I found a recommended extension promoting anti-vaccine agenda[1], The only extensions I use now are ub & Multi-account containers. I would prefer if FF integrated them by default and thorough reviews for recommended extensions.
One irritation I have with FF is its confoundingly difficult way to add arbitrary "search engines" with a keyword. eg: I want to just type `r subreddit` and have it expande to `https://reddit.com/r/subreddit`. You can DO it, but natively if FF doesn't "see" the URL as a search (so it doesn't provide the 'add search engine' option in the search bar right-click) it's overly hard to accomplish. Had to install a plugin, and/or hope project Mycroft has it.
Really wondering why this is so neglected in all browsers. I know quite a few users that like to accidentally press CTRL + T when trying to write a capital T after sitting 2h on a site to put in some info.
It is good that browsers grow more sceptical of sites capturing hotkeys, but some sites really benefit from the question if you really want to leave that page. As far as I know this is the only long-term supported solution. Restoring tab might work but not on all sites.
two leading spaces changes text to code formatting
perhaps lines are closer together here.
Reader view is great, but it seems to work on less and less sites every day. I don't know what the mechanism is by which the browser decides whether to allow reader view rendering, but it seems to not work on about half the sites I wish I could use it on these days.
For me the containers on desktop and uBlock origin support on moble are the big features of Firefox. I was glad containers made it in considering usage must be pretty low since even just "user has an extension" is less common than "user has no extensions".
TouchID support for WebAuthn is the last thing I need to make the switch for my daily driver browser. I used Firefox for years, but being able to use TouchID for auth/MFA is just such a huge quality of life improvement for me that it keeps me on Chrome.
Fortunately it looks like there has been at least a little movement on this recently (bumped from a P4 to P2)
Afair couple of times I was using fingerprint auth (that'd touchid if I understand things right) in Firefox. Very rare, but definitely had it as it was big WOW for me.
Firefox is amazing except when working with electron based web apps. Most of the note taking apps I use only have chrome extensions. So now, I have to use both.
Recently, I've researched browser battery consumption for laptops. Every test I've seen rates Firefox the worst out of the big 3 or 4. Are there any settings/extensions that may have been overlooked for these reviews that can be used to help Firefox be more energy efficient?
I don’t intend to diminish the article itself, since yes ditching chrome and Google is a win for personal privacy.
But I can’t ignore the irony of this article loading dozens of trackers. Like, is the cognitive dissonance that bad in web publishing? Do the teams writing the content not know about the way the publisher presents the data? Is this just pure hypocrisy? I’m at a loss.
An author doesn't get to choose what the website of the publisher does. It's not like this is the author's personal website that they have decided to put all of these trackers on it. This is a voice crying from within the system about how bad the system is. Is there a lot of cognitive dissonance in understanding how web publishing works?
An author does get to choose which platform they publish on. I'm really surprised by all the apologists here, the article is clearly click bait trying to cram ads down your throat. The real irony is that while the post is bearable to look at in chrome it's near enough unreadable in Firefox.
People don’t usually automatically get to write at a specific outlet just because. In this case, the writer spent nearly a year freelancing at this outlet before they became a full-time staff writer just last month, which means they had to put a lot of work in to even get their spot.
Publishing is a very competitive field, especially in the last decade as newspaper jobs have gone dry. Don’t trash on the writer because of where they work.
> An author does get to choose which platform they publish on.
A climate scientist traveling to a conference to meet with policy makers with a goal to increase awareness about a particular issue might be forced to use a mode of transportation that itself contributes to the problem of climate change.
Should the scientist adopt an absolutist/idealist position and refrain from anything that contributes to the problem, up to and including not traveling at all, because of the harm that the plane will cause in transit? Should they discard the potential longer term impact of convincing policy makers to change policy?
This is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees.
> I'm really surprised by all the apologists
It think you are misinterpreting the sentiment. An apologist would defend the tracking and ads themselves. People are not defending tracking, they are defending the utility of using the available medium to raise awareness about tracking and tools that can help mitigate it.
> the article is clearly click bait trying to cram ads down your throat
I would reframe this to something like: the majority of the content publishing business has adopted a model that embraces click bait and cramming ads down readers' throats.
This is the reality we're in.
As an author, if you want to bring awareness to this problem, or offer solutions to this problem, it only makes sense to publish that content where the readers are.
At no point does the article try to reframe the problem of tracking itself as a good thing. If it did, this would be a very different conversation.
Traditionally, at publications of repute, the advertising and journalism departments were entirely segregated from one another. This gives the appearance of independence, rather than being influenced by an advertiser. I expect that, especially since the skill sets are rather orthogonal, that kind of segregation still happens today on web publications.
Was a software developer in the ad industry. We dealt with billions of ads. A hundred hell thousand ads here or there won't make any difference.
I did use ad block though except for running tests on the code that I wrote.
In fairness, the person writing the article doesn't really have a say in the infra that the publisher is using. I agree that doesn't make the hypocrisy magically disappear, but it shouldn't detract from the points being made about the platforms we use to access the web.
Well I had a look at this article on Firefox, just to see what all the fuss is about and instantly in my face are all these Ads on TechRadar's website. They weren't even disabled by default on the first install and then you have Google being set as the default search engine. I wonder who is going to tell the editor why that is?
So either way, nothing has changed from the typical user standpoint who wants to just use a browser that not only doesn't hog their computer but takes privacy very seriously and with that simple experiment I have done, it is clear users are still no better off.
They might as well use Brave instead of Firefox which actually disables ALL these ads by default on the first install by having Brave Shields ON.
It's corporate politics. The amount of tracking and data collected is not decided by the engineers nor the content creators. Most entrepreneurs think that the more data the better and that it somehow can be monetized in the future - and analyzed by "AI", but don't want to to be liable so they use third parties to collect and store the data.
I feel this sort of black-and-white thinking about morality is responsible for a lot of problems. Short of moving into the desert and becoming some sort of Hesychastic hermit, it's difficult, near impossible to lead a life where you do no evil.
The conclusion many draw from that is not to even bother trying. I think the better conclusion is to be forgiving of the failings of others, because they too struggle with this. Maybe the point isn't to be perfect, but to reach for what's good.
OP's point is that we're all hypocrites to some degree. Expecting someone to be doing everything right before they can comment on how we can all improve leaves us waiting for deity to resolve our problems.
I don't think it's ever fair to expect someone to do everything right, but if you want to pontificate on a specific issue, you should act in congruence with that.
I don't think writing a piece about privacy and then including dozens of trackers is honest and helping the case at all; "evil publisher" isn't an excuse. Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
This assumes the author has any control over this.
On a web dominated by tracking, the harsh reality is that the avenues capable of reaching the widest audiences are going to bring with them some…baggage.
To conclude that this is dishonest is missing the forest through the trees.
Since tracking is the dominant reality, one of the best things a smart consumer can do is use tools that help counteract it.
An article like this is using the medium available to help people similarly unable to change that medium navigate it a bit more safely.
> Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
What is the cake here? What double standard does the author benefit from if his writing encourages more people to switch to a browser that is more resistant to the tracking people are accusing the author of (endorsing? It’s not clear what the accusation actually is).
Let’s examine an alternative: The author tries to convince the publisher to forego the apparatus that currently drives their business model or they’ll threaten to publish elsewhere.
The publisher calls this bluff, and the author self-publishes instead.
Fewer people read the article, fewer people switch to Firefox, and fewer people gain a modicum of protection from tracking.
What about this outcome is better?
If you gatekeep the act of publishing privacy awareness content in this way, the only thing that happens is fewer people become aware. The only thing that can weaken tracking (aside from regulation) is making it less effective.
This mindset that only the pure/virtuous/perfect implementation is acceptable, and anything else is somehow unacceptable seems like a really good way to make no progress at all.
Refusing to acknowledge the situation we’re in is just denial.
I still don't understand why that's a bad argument. In context, it's generally used to oppose hard leftist ideas (Marxism, etc). It's rarely a criticism leveled at reasonable reform or change; more when it nears outright revolution. In that case, it's not an unreasonable criticism.
It's a bad argument, because validity of a critique is not predicated on critic's life choice. It's like arguing that you cannot critique a movie because you have never made one.
It's not a critique of the idea alone, it's forcing it into context.
If we take a common example of how I've seen this play out:
A: iPhones and Apple are evil because they require child slavery.
B: But.. you own an iPhone?
A: Oh so I'm just supposed to go live in the woods?
I don't think B supports child slavery. B is pointing out that even people espousing this idea participate in the system because the alternative (not owning the iPhone) results in a worse outcome.
> It's not a critique of the idea alone, it's forcing it into context.
Exactly. But switching to individual context around societal question is the problematic argument here. Properly contextualizing means to use individual cases to explain impact, but that is not done here.
Society is formed by many individuals, and it doesn't necessarily matters what most of them do to address a particular problem. We have division of responsibility.
It's a bad argument, it's a tu quoque logical fallacy.
You can be a serial killer and admit that murdering innocents is immoral.
The identity and the actions of the person making the argument have no bearing on the validity of the argument itself, it should be judged purely on its own merits.
Is that statement that "murdering innocents is immoral" actually correct or not, regardless of who makes the statement?
I addressed this in lighter terms below, but I don't think this is a logical fallacy (in context). To carry on your example, a serial killer that believes murdering innocents is immoral should also consider themselves immoral. They have the option to not kill, and continue to do it.
This is very different from the 'holier than thou' perspective taken by those who condescendingly dismiss arguments that they are contributing to things, by their own free actions, that they claim are evil.
I mean, it is a logical fallacy, in that it is an attempt to dismiss the validity of the argument through a variation of ad hominem. Again, whether or not the person making the argument is a hypocrite, a monster, or a talking dolphin has no bearing on the validity of their argument.
The argument's validity rests purely on its own merits, regardless of who espouses or expresses it.
I can be a smoker and admit that smoking is absolutely horrible for you. Just because I am a smoker doesn't mean that the statement that smoking is horrible for you is incorrect.
I think we're just talking about two fundamentally different things.
1) Whether or not people are hypocrites (and yes, they definitely are).
2) Whether or not that hypocrisy invalidates their arguments (and no, it has no bearing on the validity of their argument).
Meh, it's quite easy to set up a website without third party (or first party) trackers. Even some github.io kind of website is better than a website with loads of tracker spam on it. It is not about black and white thinking, it is about putting in minimal effort and sticking to ones principles.
Maybe it also involves greed for viewership, "wanting to make it big" with some
article, who knows. There is not much preventing people from setting up a blog by themselves or ask someone else to help them publish in an ethical way, at least in many countries.
I guess at least some positive outcome can be concluded: People, who read on those websites might learn a thing or two.
Well it's a trade-off. Let's hypothetically say you have an important message that could save the world or something, but scream as loud as you can, you can't make everyone hear about it. You realize the only way to reach people is to do compromise with your principles, like publishing it on a major website that doesn't align with your values; which is the lesser evil, not spreading your message, or spreading it using those corrupt channels?
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. It's easy to focus too much on not doing evil that you miss the opportunity cost of doing good.
Are you writing this on internet - a tech that most if not all government use to spy on their citizens? Did you buy your computer online paying by a card or cash? Is your hardware, software all opensource and audited? Did you compile it all yourself?
I was actually pretty impressed that a mainstream (read 'ad-supported') outlet would run a story that encourages you to set up uBlock etc. Contrast it to this article that ran recently[1] on 'securing' your browser, which somehow manages to avoid mentioning that adblocking would do ten times more to protect you than any of the config changes it recommends...
There are sensible game-theoretical reasons for behaving that way. Individually choosing to forgo tracking hurts your competitive edge. Advocating for ad blocking, environmental regulations, or other industry-wide taxes will not, because everyone gets hit with that.
It's pretty simple. The journalist/editors want to write an article about privacy and web tracking. The business people want ads on the website to keep the lights on.
And to be fair to the business people, it's not like they have much choice. There are no major privacy-focused ad networks and they need a source of revenue. What do you expect them to do?
"Finally, it is always possible that man, as the result of coercion or other circumstances, can be hindered from doing certain good actions; but he can never be hindered from not doing certain actions, especially if he is prepared to die rather than to do evil."
At some point a company may have to make a decision that results in their death if they want to continue to act morally.
But much, much more often they simply modify their morals slightly and continue on. We humans are great at that.
What good would dying do in this case? There will be no shortage of other publications that will fill in the gap and happily embrace invasive advertising. If an organization keeps the lights on with ad revenue and teaches its readers to protect themselves from trackers, they've done more good than if they never existed at all.
Don’t aim your weapons at the publishers, who are generally working as morally as they can within the parameters they’ve been given.
Aim them at the ad technology firms that set the ground rules for the industry decades ago. The publishers are generally not the ones who let it degrade like this—the ad industry, which set the expectations for advertisers and marketers, did.
I've switched from Firefox to Safari for most of my browsing, and Chrome for anything that needs devtools.
Why? Battery. Efficiency. On the new M1 Macbooks I can run Safari and be unplugged all day long. The increased power consumption and battery drain is noticeable when using FF and I can't make it all the way through the day. As far as extensions go, I have 1Blocker and it works well, it does block YouTube ads. The only things I miss are Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs.
I also find performance on FF to be a lot worse than both Chrome and Safari. Firefox gets sluggish with many tabs open. JS-heavy sites will be jittery and laggy in Firefox, but buttery smooth in Chrome. Having 100 tabs open is sluggish in Firefox, but smooth in Chrome/Safari. In FF some sites will occasionally crash their tab, but they don't crash in Chrome/Safari. Etc.
Then there's the attitude of Mozilla constantly changing the interface, shoving things like Pocket or Mozilla VPN in my face. Sorry Firefox, but I've left and not coming back.
My favorite part about Safari is how, because I don't own an Apple device, I have next to no options for testing and fixing the issues that get filed with regards to my web application not working in Safari.
Probably 2/3rds of the bugs I get are specifically related to Safari while the other 1/3rd are just general issues that affect every browser.
It's insane to me that they provide no way to possibly resolve this without going out and spending money to buy their hardware.
What exactly do you expect? That Apple brings back Safari to Windows and Linux? There's public demand for that every now and then (eg [1]), but that has it's own set of problems ie. that Safari-on-Win/Lin won't be representative of what's rendered on Mac OS due to font handling, antialiasing, power management, and other peculiarities on Mac OS (Mac OS would typically run on much higher resolution than Win/Lin).
I'm not even using Mac OS currently, but I don't think it's Apple's job to make your web app run like on Chrome when Google is calling the shots on so-called "web standards" with tens or hundreds of new features every quarter, with necessarily surprising results. Personally, I'd find it ok if you just label your app with "Best run on Chrome" because that's the reality the web has degraded to, and the actual problem of web apps. Or deploy as Electron app on Mac OS.
Maybe Apple could provide a Mac OS + Safari VM, like MS was doing (or still is doing?) when they were producing IE. But then the question is on which machine would you be able to run those VMs given Apple is heading towards ARM-only instruction set machines. Should Apple commit to produce x64 binaries for backward-compatible emulation on historic hardware? Personally, I do like Apple's innovation where the rest of the industry is lagging behind.
Actually if you check that page above, under "Download build artifacts from Buildbot", there's binaries available for download which includes MiniBrowser.exe.
Ironically I just went the other way today, because Firefox became unusable in a 2009 laptop, and requires add-ons to control their exponential use of processes (on a dual core).
Meanwhile Chrome, with all its usual bloat, works perfectly fine.
You'll have to pry Firefox from my cold, dead hands!
At the outset, yes, chromium based browsers feel snappier..
But, stuff that Chrome will not have and are absolutely essential
1. Containers... I use another unverified extension to match urls and automatically assign containers...
2. Ublock origin
3. Tree style tabs
4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request
That said, i still end up using chromium for teams and outlook 365 (pwa install feature is nice)... But that's only because i don't have any other options with those two
The way Firefox style containers work they need to be "built into" not "built around". It's not as much about creating a profile and running it separately (that's just standard profiles in Chrome/Firefox, or normal OS level sandboxing) as it is auto-launching webpage requests into that profile based on matches and integrating the profiles into the app UI so the tabs stand out, can co-exist in the same window, and can be managed via built in tab creation UI.
Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.
On linux, just create a separate login and use Chrome there. In fact, what I do is create a separate user, start Chrome once, do any configuration I want and then create a tarball of the separate user's home directory. Then to start a fresh it's just a wipe of the whole directory and unpack the tarball again.
It's fast enough to just run Chrome in a loop, and on each exit wipe and unpack the original state again.
This loses substantial affordances Firefox containers give you (eg, right click->open in container, always open domain in container, access to bookmarks etc)
Why not use the native user profile function? E.g. set up a “user profile” dedicated to access only Meta/Facebook properties (and therefore only be able to track you within that container)
Manifest V3 (The browser plugin API) severely hampers uBlock Origin's abilities to block as many things as it can.
I think the first heads-up version to the public only allowed 10,000 origins to be blocked, meaning that advertisers would only need to purchase 10,001 domains and they would be able to send ads to users again.
It's been a point of sour discussion with the chrome web team for years. They've tried to adjust it to make it more palatable with the public but advertising is just too important for Google to implement the API that users want.
Google has gone so far as to use its resources to silently take control over the web to ensure that ads remain, first with AMP based web pages, and then with FLoC advertisements. Now they've replaced that with Topics but many are eyeing that very cautiously.
It cannot do CNAME uncloaking because Chrome's extension API do not provide dns resolving like on Firefox. Another example if HTML filtering where on Firefox an extension can rewrite the HTML from requests on the fly (e.g. to remove script tags, etc.). That's also not possible on Chrome and uBlock Origin will only make use of this on Firefox. There are probably more limitations, these are just two from the top of my head.
I am confused about the "I don't have any other choice" comment. I assume you mean because Firefox doesn't support whatever teams uses for meeting audio/video, or maybe it's the install feature you mentioned, but I use Firefox for both and use my phone for meetings.
There are times when I've noticed Teams to fail if I try to open it from one of my Container tabs. It complains about supported browser and stuff. But it opens perfectly on the default tab always.
"4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request" - there have been extensions for that in Chrome for a long time, though I don't know if they integrate with the developer tools/network tab itself. Agree it would be handy - I use the "replay" command in Chrome DevTools quite a bit, and if I need to modify it usually end up importing it into Postman (via the copy as cURL command, which I believe Firefox also supports).
I don't have the impression that Firefox is so much more optimised. If anything I had the opposite impression (Chrome using less CPU than Firefox). Makes sense too because Google has a ton of money and Mozilla doesn't.
Still I mainly use firefox and on most computers it's the only browser I even have installed.
I'm back to FF as well (after some Chrome years), and love it. However, for my work I use Google Meet and online collaboration tools such as Miro. Unfortunately, I only use Chrome for those services because FF will jumpstart my Macbook fans quickly when using Google Meet / FF.
I use both browsers (mostly FF on powerful machines and Chrome if I need to use Core2Duo or older) and I have an impression that Firefox has some memory leaks. Chrome browser loaded with as much tabs as allowed by my RAM can store its tabs forever. But Firefox can not do the same, despite it has been written on Rust.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadIE also had/has MRU tabs.
That doesn't explain why the other method isn't at least an option in Chrome but I figured it was worth mentioning for those that missed the functionality.
I must admit, however, that I do have Tab Flip for Tree Style Tab, with Shift+F2 to switch between the current and most recently selected tabs (like Ctrl+6 in Vim to toggle between the most recent buffers), and have added similar elsewhere, with Meta+F2 to switch between most recent workspaces in the Sway or i3 window managers:
I wouldn’t want to be without at least this single-level MRU in my browser or window manager. (On more traditional window managers, you normally have Alt+Tab or ⌘⇥ and ⌘` which are all some form of more extensive MRU list, though I find macOS’s application-level treatment bizarre and extraordinarily frustrating because of how cripplingly limiting it is if you work with multiple multi-window apps and want to see a window of each. And yeah, it’s easy to see when reflecting on Alt+Tab why Firefox went the way they did with Ctrl+Tab, making it behave similarly. But I haven’t previously found anyone actually liking it.)Its likely more useful for those who tend towards many tabs open at once
A) name tab groups;
B) lock specific groups which mimics the capability of bookmark folders (clicking a link doesn’t remove it from the group).
The extension has helped me reduce the number of open windows on my laptop, among other productivity improvements.
MRU should always be the default, this is also what IDE's do, and alt+tab does with main windows.
What is even the point of ctrl+tab cycling to next tab? You got to press it dozens of times to go back to the original tab... Why would anyone use that? You can use ctrl+pgdn and pgup to go to next/previous which is more sensible for this.
So disappointingly, now I turned this feature on in FF, and I'm disappointed to see that it only cycles through most recent tab of current window. I wish it would go through any window. I have always dozens of windows with dozens of tabs each, and I find myself sometimes just opening the same URL again due to not bothering trying to find back a tab I was in just a few minutes ago due to not having a ctrl+tab that goes to most recent tab in any window.
ctrl+tab cycling to the next tab is essential for many ways of surfing the web.
For instance, research a topic and tap up many tabs. Now go through them one by one. And in the process of doing so you might want to tab up even more.
At this point cycling to the next tab becomes a way to navigate the history, but where you have the context of each step preserved. MRU in this context is a nightmare.
MRU for tabs doesn't make any sense to me, that purpose is served by switching to another window instead (which is, and should be, MRU).
finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
>finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
not at all, they are ordered and you already know the direction you want to go. Unlike MRU that breaks down completely after a few tabs.
As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Opening multiple tabs from one place, and then going through them exactly in that order, is just not something that happens often for me.
> As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Not at all. Imagine you were reading some document in some tab. This tab could be in any window, on any workspace.
Now you check your email in-between, which is another tab in another window.
Now after checking your email, you want to go back to the document you were reading: try finding it back amongst all windows across all desktops, possibly not anymore the front tab because you also just opened a link from the document, or instinctively opened the discord tab of the window the document was in or paused some youtube music that was playing, or whatever!
MRU solves that perfectly. We're talking about 100s of tabs across multiple windows here. With MRU you only have to go through maybe max 10 or so, which is easy to find the document back in.
In code editors I often have several dozens of tabs open, and MRU is a crucial usability feature when coding, so I’d say that its usefulness is independent of the number of open tabs.
I have tree style tabs so my tabs are all already ordered in a vaguely meaningful way, but the recent use order of my last tabs is completely unpredictable to me!
With this feature on ^tab might as well be random for how badly it confuses me.. I'm so glad Mozilla hadn't removed the opt-out yet.
Chrome is also more stable. For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
But on principle I use Firefox whenever possible. I appreciate the effort that went into it. Still have to use Chrome daily for one or two business web apps that block FF.
Reported memory use (in Activity Monitor) varies, 8GB-25GB, and it's often swapping. Sometimes it uses more, and then the system crashes. Often it fills my remaining 20GB of free disk space for swap space. Surprisingly, even opening HN pages and only following HN links (i.e. all text-only), the memory usage grows in this way over time.
It's not possible to scroll smoothly or type a comment like this without pauses and occasional spinning beach balls. Just scrolling through a page with two-finger drag, it will stop every 10 seconds or so, then jump forwawrd. Moving the cursor with the cursor keys in this comment window is similar.
The constant jank and pauses may be entirely due to memory swapping or some other garbage-collection like overhead, I have no way to know.
What other people write about this issue is that it's likely some combination of number of tabs, and the fact that modern pages need a lot of memory for large images, compositing and similar, and perhaps memory used by add-ons. But all of this has suggestive evidence against it: If I go to about:memory and click "Minimize memory usage", it consistently brings memory usage down to not much more than when Firefox starts up, without appearing to change any functionality or deactivate any tabs; and when it starts up it's using less than 8GB despite loading up the same session. It also does this itself spontaneously from time to time, though not reliably enough.
That said, I switched from Safari when I realised Safari was also being a memory hog and was causing everything else on the laptop to be slow. At the time I switched, Firefox was a lovely breath of fresh air in that department. Even though I copied over all my tabs from Safari (by hand), Firefox ran in very much less RAM, and life was good again on the laptop.
Something has changed since then, making Firefox much worse for memory usage, and I don't yet know what it is.
And I see the real memory usage grown, eventually to crashing size, even when I'm just reading around HN, clicking many article headings and comments but remaining within the HN text-only site.
I agree it's probably made worse caused by specific sites, but I haven't been able to figure out which ones, or perhaps it's wide range of them, which defeats browsing in general. However, I now avoid Telegram Web, because that does consistently crash Firefox for me eventually (I've seen reported memory use grow to 67GB when TW was open, about three times).
Whatever it is, it doesn't look like site JavaScript holding data in large JavaScript objects or DOM trees, because minimizing memory use with "about:memory" reduces the size to workable levels without any other observable effect on open pages.
So I'm inclined to think of the Firefox as having a severe reclaimable-but-not-reclaimed memory leak or cache problem of some kind, that is outside the world of JavaScript data.
I do find that some websites end up using 1GB+ of memory if you leave them running for an extended period of time (looking at you MacRumors forums) but that happens on Safari and Chrome, too. HN is usually the safest one that uses the least memory. Sites with lots of ads load all kinds of crap and can use surprising amounts of memory.
I bet there are settings to be configured.
Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.
Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.
My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.
Though MS Teams often gets stuck in a reload loop inside a container, but Teams is a total trainwreck anyway.
One thing I love about Chrome/Edge profiles is being able to different extensions enabled/disabled and configured differently across them.
For example, I have a "private" profile that always runs windscribe vpn and other privacy-heavy extensions that I might not necessarily want running on my "base" profile.
DNS blocking is better than nothing, but it's very basic when compared to a browser extension like uBlock Origin.
But BAT is a different beast as it doesn't use mining. So my concern is not the same as for general crypto schemes.
It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers. I just want the advertising industry to die and get out from between the content creators and consumers. I know this is not a realistic viewpoint but I'm not willing to contribute to it. Brave solves the privacy problem to some extent but not the ad problem. And in a way they even promote ads by paying users to view them.
Brave seems to be looking to make the current system more palatable (and of course become the gatekeeper for this new tech which would be priceless if it ever took off). I've long given up on the ad system completely. I already pay for the sites I like and use a lot (at least where they offer this option) but I don't make any exception for adblocking ever. Even when they're non-tracked.
They can try to "ban" whatever they want, but it's not happening.
The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks. The fact is that it's the simplest way for content providers to generate revenue, and that won't change overnight. What BAT is attempting to do is establish a market between content consumers and providers. The BAT wallet is funded either by attention, i.e. consuming ads, or by directly purchasing BAT. In that sense, the advertising middle-man could eventually be removed from the transaction.
Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects. We also need them to be friendly for content providers to integrate in order to boost adoption.
I agree, but it's not like I can't wish for it :)
> Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects.
I don't like being told how I should feel about something :) I don't celebrate them and I won't. For me the solution is ever more and ever more efficient adblockers, as well as bans on tracking like the EU is doing. This is something that does really work. Many sites are really seeing a drop in income from ads and are looking for alternatives now. Hurting someone in their wallet really works.
I think BAT is a dead-end, they don't have the market power to bring about this change, and the ideal outcome is only one of the possible ones around. Seeing as how you really do celebrate their solution but still don't use it illustrates the issue I see with it.
On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.
How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.
I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.
In fact I see people who are more wealthy not using adblockers and paywall bypassers because they feel like they should support the sites somehow. It's a similar thing with downloading video content, many of my better-off friends are not downloading because they are worried about content disappearing. They actually care about the overall economic model working. My friends from worse circumstances (I know many people in lesser-off countries) don't give a shit about that and download all they can get. And I agree with them.
I myself don't have this worry. Content will never disappear one way or another. We had content on the internet before ads were really a thing and it was better than it is now in many ways. And I like cutting into the big megacorps' profits.
Raw < DNS blocking < custom solutions < uBlock Origin
Secondly, enabling JS on per site basis is easier on FF Android with UBO. Speeds up browsing a lot.
FF + uBlock, on the other hand, has no problem with this.
Also, check out Firefox Focus on Android. Pretty convenient to use as the default browser for guest browsing.
I only have four extensions now: uBlock Origin, I Don't Care About Cookies, one for user agent switching, and one for removing HTML elements via the context menu.
Isn't this equivalent to the element zapper in uBO?[1] It's not available from the context menu but you can assign a shortcut to bring it up.[2]
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-zapper
[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Keyboard-shortcuts
And no offense if TechRadar is writing articles like this... they should open their own site without any of the extensions and watch the ads, popups, autoplay videos and such. Maybe they will notice the problem doesn't start with the browser of your choice.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
I bet there will be a Chromium for without that + Brave is already working on it. Power of open source I guess?
Brave is an option but I don't really like where they're heading with their crypto tokens.
If you don't care about that, firefox with uBO is really much better IMO.
Chrome is only going downhill from now. So is Edge, Microsoft has already at the stage where they don't prioritise user experience and appeal anymore and are priorising monetisation. Like with the "buy now and pay later" scams they're including. It's IE4 all over again, once they arrive at the desired marketshare the user is just a dumb sheep to them again.
Unfortunately Mozilla is far from perfect, they're becoming too corporate and weaseling in monetisation schemes totally in conflict with their goals. But they're still a world better.
Meanwhile they try to make the browser as mainstream friendly, not understanding that the mainstream has long given up on them and they only have the last remaining bastion of hardcore privacy users left. Whose user patterns they're not seeing because they focus too much on telemetry.
I think since they became Mozilla Inc they started thinking like big tech and are slowly becoming just like it. But because their foundation origins the declining marketshare is not ringing their alarm bells like they, in a real company, would.
If they really wanted to diversify and get me to pay for something, they have to do more than just resell mullvad. I'm a mullvad user but I much rather pay for that directly as it gives me a lot more features. I love mullvad but I want to use it in more than just a browser.
What I'd want to see and would pay for:
- A service like Apple's iCloud Private Relay that really makes browsing more anonymous (rather than a basic VPN which they offer now, that's too little too late).
- Paid Sync storage (with full E2E so I have no reason to self-host)
- An archiving service of webpages (also E2E). Because onenote sucks more and more
Basically things other than 'quick wins' but that need some serious vision and development. Right now they're thinking way too much like a lazy CEO, doing a quick tie-in with another service hoping for some takeup or some cheap marketing benefit.
If they want to diversify and get people to pay they really have to offer some real benefits that are a gap in the market. Those exist but they need some more work than just a quick joint marketing effort.
See "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox" in the official GitHub repo's wiki:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
The big picture however, is that Firefox works for you, chrome works for Google.
The Chromium (and its derivatives) builds makes it clear they have a compile farm of unlimited compute and ram, so it's just "which kind of bad" I nowadays, I guess
- Native reader mode
- Native PiP mode for videos
Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
Things I want to see in Firefox:
- Good/extensible keybindings
- Tab groups
- Tab search
EDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new paragraph? You know, for bullet points, etc.
There's been an open issue for 7 years asking for a shortcut key for the eyedropper[0]. The navigation between developer panels is also a bit tedious. The page focus key, F6, is not configurable.
These are some instances I was thinking when I said I wanted good keybinding support. I'll be really willing to try an extension that achieves these but it's really the browser's job.
With that said, I've tried a bunch of these extensions in the past! I'm not a vim guy so I settled with Link Hints[1] for in-page navigation. I cannot recommend it enough for non-vim guys. It's really underrated.
0: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177108 1: https://lydell.github.io/LinkHints/
JFYI, Alt+D and Ctrl+L also work.
I've discovered that "ctrl-f esc" also works; focus goes back to the page when the search bar closes. Convenient if you have capslock remapped to escape.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-extension-shortc... is a little hidden, but gives you at least some flexibility.
> Tab search
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo..., I use % in the address bar very regularly.
I use * for bookmarks and ^ for history but have never known about this. :)
Thanks!
And yes, I do use extension shortcuts. Can't imagine my life without Bitwarden or Tab Stash keybindings.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177108 to know what I actually meant.
Tab search exists: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo..., also you type % into the address bar to start searching over tabs. Not sure if this covers your needs, though.
Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands
(I'm aware of Orion, but when I last used it I found it to still have performance and polish issues)
Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.
with TST whenever I need to reorder/re-group things, it's a pain (I still appreciate TST a lot)
opera had vertical, grouped tabs over twenty years ago.
Which raises the question: why would FF sabotage it? Why isn't it easy to hide the default tabs, and why does the sidebar have the name of the extension providing it stuck at the top?
They had all of the warning in the world about how important this extension was to people years before finally removing XUL, half a decade later you still can only repair the display problems through CSS that isn't kept consistent from version to version, and feature requests/bug reports on the issue are filled with antagonism from the project.
Is it this one?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
No - it is figuratively the killer feature.
If it were literally the killer function this would be a very different discussion.
vs
> (literally the killer) feature
A "killer feature" is a phrase with its own meaning so we can treat it as an atom and apply modifiers to it. The order of operations matters, and I posit that the OP placed their imaginary parentheses as I did in my first example.
Easy, most people never use more than five or six tabs because it’s annoying to have more. TST is a solution to a marginal use case so no one invests the time into developing it.
but most useful is the auto-grouping of child tabs anyways
And Tree Tabs felt like a better Tree Style Tabs (but there were no bugfixes in past 4 years).
Though very rarely Sideberry looses/forgets the tree structure of tabs, and I have to restore it from one of the recent snapshots (which it creates every day automatically).
1. Go to `about:config` and set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets true
2. Go to `about:support` and find your profile folder
3. Create subfolder `chrome` there
4. Create file `userChrome.css` in `chrome` folder
5. Put this text in it:
https://gist.github.com/wlonkly/6c21134adbdeb6eb257f52076bc3...
and it gives me a nice and minimalist UI consisting of just-dense-enough tab titles, with the current tab highlighted. Looks like so:
https://i.imgur.com/FB59WfX.png
https://gist.github.com/ruanbekker/f800e098936b27c7cf956c560...
https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...
https://medium.com/@Aenon/firefox-hide-native-tabs-and-title...
/r/firefoxcss is great for asking questions regarding how to customize TST https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/search?q=tst&restrict_sr...
That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.
Blank line / new paragraph is really the only option. Short bullet points might look better with the "code" option of preceding with two spaces, like:
But long lines in that format force horizontal scrolling for some mobile users.https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
*https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Please no. I actually switched to Firefox on mobile just because I couldn't get tab groups to stay disabled in Chrome.
I think the current design is ugly. The way Edge handles them in the vertical tabs sidebar looks a lot better than the way other Chromium derivatives handle them in the tab strip, but still not the best. I like Vivaldi's implementation better, but the UI is relatively laggy. I miss old Opera.
(Thanks in advance for the solution. I mostly use Firefox anyway)
https://knowtechie.com/how-to-enable-google-chrome-reader-mo...
But on the downside no translate tool (though I read it is coming).
Operates entirely offline.
Bonus points for it being offline.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...
Coworkers look at me like I’m a freak because I usually keep fewer than 10 tabs open :)
Same here, and I don’t even use bookmarks! History and custom search shortcuts are enough.
maybe sometime will come the realisation that a tab, a bookmark and a history entry are basically the same
Haha! That's me. My maximum is 15 and then my cleanliness ghost kicks in. I said tab groups because I like organization even if it's just 10 tabs. I honestly don't know why I said tab search.
The former don't preserve login state (and site state in general) or scroll position, navigating between them requires an internet connection and often uses significant data (important when working from a metered and/or unreliable connection like on a train or plane), just to name a few differences.
I do use bookmarks for longer term organization but my workspace is all handled in tab groups.
I don't use groups (I liked them when tab groups were a feature of Firefox). I search for tabs by typing stuff in the awesome bar, that works.
I always have a lot of tabs and kill everything from times to times. But it's nice to reach a tab that's already loaded when you need it, instead of reloading the page every time, making a network access, using resources and having to wait. A page being already open is also a hint that it's something I accessed recently and that it's most likely the thing I need.
I don't want to waste my time managing bookmarks (actually the sibling comment from lamacase captures my view very well on this). That's not how I use a browser. But it's good they are there for people like you who find a use for it.
For persisting state, it’s simple. You don’t. History is going to send you back where you were if the url scheme is not brain dead. I will personally stop using sites which don’t do that properly because they are annoying to use.
For forms I just fill them when I need to or keep them open for a bit if I forget I would need some information which I need to check. If I realise it’s going to take some time, I just close them and fill them properly when I have all I need.
I have no idea why nobody uses bookmarks and everybody keeps hundreds of tabs open. When did that start? Who even has the RAM for that? How do you even click on them when they’re that tiny? So many things just don’t make sense.
Thus I would expect most people have the RAM unless they're on a yesteryear SBC.
FWIW, I have 128GB of RAM, and fully utilize it.
The unremovable "floating" controls are visually distracting.
Tab search, keybinds, and many many other handy stuff, can be done in vimperator.
I went back to Windows after almost 2 years for work and MS has managed to bloat it too. Don't understand why I need a Math solver. Edge bar is annoying. Favorites and bookmarks are 2 separate things?
I turned them all off obviously but defaults matter.
What turned me off from it was when I lost a year's worth of (unimportant) bookmarks and history. One day I opened it up and it decided to kindly sign me in automatically (probably detected I was signed into an MS site in-browser), and it wanted to automatically sync all my history, auto-fill info and passwords to Microsoft's sync servers. I immediately disconnected my account to stop this, and then it deleted my Edge profile afterwards as a further courtesy.
I understand that these two behaviors are probably Features, but I don't like the feeling of losing control of my software. And now these features like MSFT Rewards, coupon services, credit card services, and the "Bing Bar" (or whatever you call it) are just too much for me. Not to mention every PC I use Edge on tends to assault my eyes with political propaganda since Edge's New Tab page defaults to biased news outlets.
browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator
browser.urlbar.unitConversion.enabled
Both essentially have the idea of "spaces" for web browsers.
I've been using Brave for a while and I'm considering going back to FF, partly to get out of Chromium.
However, this is a point I don't get. What do I care if these features are native or plug-ins? My Brave plugins are synced, so whenever I install Brave and set it up I immediately. If the plugin is well done, there is no difference, and for people who don't care about that particular feature it could be less bloat to have it on a feature.
Specifically for the Reader mode, the Chromium Addon I use comes from the Firefox code for the same functionality, so it's just as good. Kudos to FF, OSS is awesome.
Blank lines separate paragraphs.
Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized. To get a literal asterisk, use * or *.
Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)
Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission.
If your url gets linked incorrectly, put it in <angle brackets> and it should work.
Alt-7 on the number pad give you a bullet "•", Alt-0151 an em dash "—"
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/
This fixes most of the links on HN for me - I'm one of those people who doesn't like the browser to save anything, so every time I visit a site it's for the first time - so anyway reader mode just cuts right through all the shit in one click, no cookie banners, no subscribe banners, no interruption banners, it gets straight to the content if it's there (sometimes even cuts through shallow front end paywalls) - honestly if the site looks horrible and reader mode doesn't work, close tab - can't be arsed.
It also makes far better use of screen space than most site designs, e.g those common yet horrible headers with css position: sticky. Pretty much every big news site is made better by pulling any content into reader mode.
% - Tab search
^ - History search
* - Bookmark search
Especially since I have to rely upon the browser for most 3rd party services due to the lack of a proper Linux client.
But running Firefox on Linux mobile has largely been a community effort, I wish Mozilla realizes the need-gap and invests in official Linux smartphone version.
But I'm actively moving away from 3rd party extensions in FF as I found a recommended extension promoting anti-vaccine agenda[1], The only extensions I use now are ub & Multi-account containers. I would prefer if FF integrated them by default and thorough reviews for recommended extensions.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210924045611/https://github.co...
Really wondering why this is so neglected in all browsers. I know quite a few users that like to accidentally press CTRL + T when trying to write a capital T after sitting 2h on a site to put in some info.
It is good that browsers grow more sceptical of sites capturing hotkeys, but some sites really benefit from the question if you really want to leave that page. As far as I know this is the only long-term supported solution. Restoring tab might work but not on all sites.
Brave with uMatrix works well for me. Disabled the metrics and crypto stuff.
Fortunately it looks like there has been at least a little movement on this recently (bumped from a P4 to P2)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536482
It still doesn't work on Mac or Linux.. FFS.
But I can’t ignore the irony of this article loading dozens of trackers. Like, is the cognitive dissonance that bad in web publishing? Do the teams writing the content not know about the way the publisher presents the data? Is this just pure hypocrisy? I’m at a loss.
Also, the author in this case is a staff writer for the publication. The entire point of her being on staff is to write content for that site.
Publishing is a very competitive field, especially in the last decade as newspaper jobs have gone dry. Don’t trash on the writer because of where they work.
A climate scientist traveling to a conference to meet with policy makers with a goal to increase awareness about a particular issue might be forced to use a mode of transportation that itself contributes to the problem of climate change.
Should the scientist adopt an absolutist/idealist position and refrain from anything that contributes to the problem, up to and including not traveling at all, because of the harm that the plane will cause in transit? Should they discard the potential longer term impact of convincing policy makers to change policy?
This is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees.
> I'm really surprised by all the apologists
It think you are misinterpreting the sentiment. An apologist would defend the tracking and ads themselves. People are not defending tracking, they are defending the utility of using the available medium to raise awareness about tracking and tools that can help mitigate it.
> the article is clearly click bait trying to cram ads down your throat
I would reframe this to something like: the majority of the content publishing business has adopted a model that embraces click bait and cramming ads down readers' throats.
This is the reality we're in.
As an author, if you want to bring awareness to this problem, or offer solutions to this problem, it only makes sense to publish that content where the readers are.
At no point does the article try to reframe the problem of tracking itself as a good thing. If it did, this would be a very different conversation.
When I did my internship in an ad agency the first thing I was told was to install an adblocker. Talking about hypocrisy.
Is it possible there's an innocent explanation? Like to avoid accusations of impression fraud or otherwise mitigate the risk of false impressions?
Yet I imagine one would also need a non-blocked browser to check results and competitor ads too.
Warren Buffet can advocate for changes in the tax laws that benefit the country while still playing hard by the existing rules.
Authors can advocate for changes to the web while their host is still doing the bad thing.
These can be seen as hypocrisy, but I think there is a large dose of honesty and in some cases humility in these situations.
So either way, nothing has changed from the typical user standpoint who wants to just use a browser that not only doesn't hog their computer but takes privacy very seriously and with that simple experiment I have done, it is clear users are still no better off.
They might as well use Brave instead of Firefox which actually disables ALL these ads by default on the first install by having Brave Shields ON.
The conclusion many draw from that is not to even bother trying. I think the better conclusion is to be forgiving of the failings of others, because they too struggle with this. Maybe the point isn't to be perfect, but to reach for what's good.
"Do as I say, not as I do" is rarely forgivable. One or two lingering trackers? Maybe. But that's not the case here.
On a web dominated by tracking, the harsh reality is that the avenues capable of reaching the widest audiences are going to bring with them some…baggage.
To conclude that this is dishonest is missing the forest through the trees.
Since tracking is the dominant reality, one of the best things a smart consumer can do is use tools that help counteract it.
An article like this is using the medium available to help people similarly unable to change that medium navigate it a bit more safely.
> Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
What is the cake here? What double standard does the author benefit from if his writing encourages more people to switch to a browser that is more resistant to the tracking people are accusing the author of (endorsing? It’s not clear what the accusation actually is).
Let’s examine an alternative: The author tries to convince the publisher to forego the apparatus that currently drives their business model or they’ll threaten to publish elsewhere.
The publisher calls this bluff, and the author self-publishes instead.
Fewer people read the article, fewer people switch to Firefox, and fewer people gain a modicum of protection from tracking.
What about this outcome is better?
If you gatekeep the act of publishing privacy awareness content in this way, the only thing that happens is fewer people become aware. The only thing that can weaken tracking (aside from regulation) is making it less effective.
This mindset that only the pure/virtuous/perfect implementation is acceptable, and anything else is somehow unacceptable seems like a really good way to make no progress at all.
Refusing to acknowledge the situation we’re in is just denial.
If we take a common example of how I've seen this play out:
A: iPhones and Apple are evil because they require child slavery.
B: But.. you own an iPhone?
A: Oh so I'm just supposed to go live in the woods?
I don't think B supports child slavery. B is pointing out that even people espousing this idea participate in the system because the alternative (not owning the iPhone) results in a worse outcome.
Exactly. But switching to individual context around societal question is the problematic argument here. Properly contextualizing means to use individual cases to explain impact, but that is not done here.
Society is formed by many individuals, and it doesn't necessarily matters what most of them do to address a particular problem. We have division of responsibility.
You can be a serial killer and admit that murdering innocents is immoral.
The identity and the actions of the person making the argument have no bearing on the validity of the argument itself, it should be judged purely on its own merits.
Is that statement that "murdering innocents is immoral" actually correct or not, regardless of who makes the statement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
This is very different from the 'holier than thou' perspective taken by those who condescendingly dismiss arguments that they are contributing to things, by their own free actions, that they claim are evil.
The argument's validity rests purely on its own merits, regardless of who espouses or expresses it.
I can be a smoker and admit that smoking is absolutely horrible for you. Just because I am a smoker doesn't mean that the statement that smoking is horrible for you is incorrect.
I think we're just talking about two fundamentally different things.
1) Whether or not people are hypocrites (and yes, they definitely are).
2) Whether or not that hypocrisy invalidates their arguments (and no, it has no bearing on the validity of their argument).
Maybe it also involves greed for viewership, "wanting to make it big" with some article, who knows. There is not much preventing people from setting up a blog by themselves or ask someone else to help them publish in an ethical way, at least in many countries.
I guess at least some positive outcome can be concluded: People, who read on those websites might learn a thing or two.
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. It's easy to focus too much on not doing evil that you miss the opportunity cost of doing good.
Last I heard FF was generating a unique identifier on each installer download. https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...
I'm hoping the Duck Duck Go browser or Vivaldi is better.
1:https://gizmodo.com/how-to-secure-web-browser-chrome-edge-fi...
And to be fair to the business people, it's not like they have much choice. There are no major privacy-focused ad networks and they need a source of revenue. What do you expect them to do?
"Finally, it is always possible that man, as the result of coercion or other circumstances, can be hindered from doing certain good actions; but he can never be hindered from not doing certain actions, especially if he is prepared to die rather than to do evil."
At some point a company may have to make a decision that results in their death if they want to continue to act morally.
But much, much more often they simply modify their morals slightly and continue on. We humans are great at that.
Aim them at the ad technology firms that set the ground rules for the industry decades ago. The publishers are generally not the ones who let it degrade like this—the ad industry, which set the expectations for advertisers and marketers, did.
Why? Battery. Efficiency. On the new M1 Macbooks I can run Safari and be unplugged all day long. The increased power consumption and battery drain is noticeable when using FF and I can't make it all the way through the day. As far as extensions go, I have 1Blocker and it works well, it does block YouTube ads. The only things I miss are Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs.
I also find performance on FF to be a lot worse than both Chrome and Safari. Firefox gets sluggish with many tabs open. JS-heavy sites will be jittery and laggy in Firefox, but buttery smooth in Chrome. Having 100 tabs open is sluggish in Firefox, but smooth in Chrome/Safari. In FF some sites will occasionally crash their tab, but they don't crash in Chrome/Safari. Etc.
Then there's the attitude of Mozilla constantly changing the interface, shoving things like Pocket or Mozilla VPN in my face. Sorry Firefox, but I've left and not coming back.
Probably 2/3rds of the bugs I get are specifically related to Safari while the other 1/3rd are just general issues that affect every browser.
It's insane to me that they provide no way to possibly resolve this without going out and spending money to buy their hardware.
I'm not even using Mac OS currently, but I don't think it's Apple's job to make your web app run like on Chrome when Google is calling the shots on so-called "web standards" with tens or hundreds of new features every quarter, with necessarily surprising results. Personally, I'd find it ok if you just label your app with "Best run on Chrome" because that's the reality the web has degraded to, and the actual problem of web apps. Or deploy as Electron app on Mac OS.
Maybe Apple could provide a Mac OS + Safari VM, like MS was doing (or still is doing?) when they were producing IE. But then the question is on which machine would you be able to run those VMs given Apple is heading towards ARM-only instruction set machines. Should Apple commit to produce x64 binaries for backward-compatible emulation on historic hardware? Personally, I do like Apple's innovation where the rest of the industry is lagging behind.
[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/safari-for-windows-editorial/
=> https://WebKit.org/downloads
They’re not marketed as “Safari” because Safari is part of macOS, but it’s an official build of the same rendering engine.
But unfortunately they don't provide binaries, so you have to build from source.
https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingCairoOnWindows#Download...
It's funny to me how many people give one tiny reason and are like... Nope goodbye forever.
Meanwhile Chrome, with all its usual bloat, works perfectly fine.
At the outset, yes, chromium based browsers feel snappier..
But, stuff that Chrome will not have and are absolutely essential
1. Containers... I use another unverified extension to match urls and automatically assign containers...
2. Ublock origin
3. Tree style tabs
4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request
That said, i still end up using chromium for teams and outlook 365 (pwa install feature is nice)... But that's only because i don't have any other options with those two
Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.
It's fast enough to just run Chrome in a loop, and on each exit wipe and unpack the original state again.
I call it Groundhog Day Mode.
To answer the poster's curiosity, I messed it up by pressing the neighbouring key by accident and not checking sufficiently. :-P
I think the first heads-up version to the public only allowed 10,000 origins to be blocked, meaning that advertisers would only need to purchase 10,001 domains and they would be able to send ads to users again.
It's been a point of sour discussion with the chrome web team for years. They've tried to adjust it to make it more palatable with the public but advertising is just too important for Google to implement the API that users want.
Google has gone so far as to use its resources to silently take control over the web to ensure that ads remain, first with AMP based web pages, and then with FLoC advertisements. Now they've replaced that with Topics but many are eyeing that very cautiously.
Also it's just going to be totally crippled once manifest v3 extensions are mandatory
It's a fork of kintesh/containerise which seems unmaintained and had case problems.
It's not on FF addons site - so please satisfy yourself that it isn't doing sinister stuff before installing.
Teams web is crippled on FF with no video sharing & filters last I checked... Teams app is also crippled on linux - so the webapp is preferable.
Outlook's been broken the last week - just doesn't load and the service worker seems to get stuck in a loop.
Still I mainly use firefox and on most computers it's the only browser I even have installed.