This seems to be a popular opinion, but I believe they probably do it because it's good for their bottom line. The MS case was very different. The only relevant market was desktop computing, they had a monopoly on the desktop OS market, they baked the browser into the OS for no good reason, and they were taking actions to make OS competition impossible. Having a high desktop browser market share number honestly isn't a problem.
I don't think that's relevant to the argument about competition. Being able to pull (most) of their source code doesn't make it easy to write a competing browser engine. Why do you think writing a browser engine is an impossibly daunting task nowadays? Who made the web this way?
Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"
Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide diversification and non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money that there would be screaming if they tried)"
no, the criticism of their side projects is NOT that they would provide diversification, it's that they're usually politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions with no chance of ever producing additional revenue except maybe by bringing users to Firefox by convincing them that Mozilla better-aligns with their worldview or whatever
except oops all corporate politics are the same so the politically motivated feel-good crap from Mozilla is exactly the same as the politically motivated feel-good crap from every other corporation and so it's all just a waste of time and money and effort that COULD as you put it "provide diversification" instead, if Mozilla was competently run
Non of them are "politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions" but bets to diversification (which also mostly failed for one reason or another) (and yes Pocket contains political motivated nonsens in it's recommendation system, but by itself isn't a politically motivated features, but a feature I would want to see more of deeper integrated into FF, just REALLY without the recommendation system and a somehow more natural part-of-FF felling UI/UX).
I mean sure that color theme nonsense was politically motivated feel-good nonsense. But using that as point to get hung up on is exactly what the OP comment meant, people tend to be very selective about remembering things so that they fit their narrative.
That’s a great list of nice things that are easy to take for granted. While reading it, I couldn’t help but think of the “What have the Romans ever done for us” scene from Monty Python¹.
I didn’t know about Text to Speech (TTS) but personally wouldn’t have much use for it. The other things I didn’t recognise is VR. I’m guessing this refers to Firefox Reality on the Oculus Go VR Headset² (which seems to be no longer available).
and and I think there was a bit of additional research level stuff never ending up in user hands
but both are somewhat dead, idk. if Firefox Reality still works with any VR headset at all (it might still work with non standalone headset usage) and Hubs is shutting down end of March, a community version still exist (Hubs ~= somewhat like VRChat from the idea but not as VR specific and just less interesting in general)
same for most other things they are either dead or fizzled out (and some are stables, but don't bring users, like pdf.js)
One thing I forget to mention is FF does a lot of work to reduce fingerprint-ability of existing interfaces (while trying to avoid breaking websites by changing/breaking existing interfaces, like some other more privacy focused browsers do). A bunch of this is done in context for the tor-browser but also benefit normal FF. Sadly you using FF ads more information to the fingerprint then any of the protections due to better fingerprint protection (something which is true for any form of privacy protection not used en mass by every one).
Chrome is doing the "I make my own web standards and push them through, ups now my feature is standard incompatible so I try to force change the upcoming standard just before it gets committed" thing IE had done in the past (it's e.g. the main reason why you sometimes end up with CORS issues on FF, the site isn't standard compatible as it doesn't handle a certain thing the standard requires from websites but due to a last minute exception for chrome doesn't require browsers to enforce).
And Safari does the "I don't adopt new standards forever and have strange bugs" IE think. Funnily like IE there are a lot of devs which swear that it has no strange bug problem (because they mainly use libraries developed on/for or at least tested with safari, but if you use some more newer tech it Safari support can be quite costly).
To be fair, IE and Netscape existed before there was an active standards body. 25 years ago standards were developed in a waterfall like process that took years.
The only time new features were released was when IE or Netscape pushed them.
Yes both Chrome and Safari are "the new IE" but for different reasons
I think people make too much of Safari lagging in the adoption of standards. Yes, they lag behind on what Chrome is pushing but they're also ahead on other features, like color spaces.
I'm familiar with Safari strange bugs but it's usually while I'm testing with VoiceOver so I have fewer occasions to notice bugs with Chrome or Firefox, which don't work as well with VoiceOver overall.
I think of Safari being the new IE because it's not as evergreen as other browsers; old but still usable iPhones and iPads can't run the current version and aren't allowed to run anything else. Thus, developers have more reason to care about what a browser from 2+ years ago supports.
A ludicrous and non-serious statement. Safari leads in several areas, and both it and Firefox push back against Google’s self-serving and privacy-threatening “features” it wants people to think are web standards.
This is the first time I've ever heard someone say this. The overwelming sentiment is that safari is leagues behind, lacks features, lacks performance is has the worst standards support of all common browsers.
What areas are you referring to?
All we ever did at my jobs, when people complained "it doesn't work on safari" is put up a banner for safari users pointing them to either the app-store for our app, or to the fact their browser is not supported.
I've only ever gotten complaints from safari users that stuff was broken (It wasn't, their browser just did stuff wrong/differently/not-yet)
Position sticky, has, subgrid, and filters to name a few. And now it’s pushing forward color standards, better text layout, new image formats, and more css math functions.
Yes to all of this. It's easy to find plenty of features on CanIUse.com (with the Date Relative view) that were shipped by Safari before Chrome (Firefox had SubGrid way before the others but there was a long gap until Chrome finally shipped it).
If you use Firefox for privacy reasons, and especially if you're concerned about your data potentially ending up with Google (or other entities), please be sure to read the Firefox Privacy Notice:
It currently mentions "Google" a number of times, along with "Microsoft", "eBay", "AdMarketplace", "Cloudflare", "Comcast", "Adjust", "Fastly", "our partners", and other entities.
I think a lot of people believe that Firefox respects its users' privacy more than it actually does.
They may be surprised to learn how many, and which, third-parties might be involved when using Firefox.
The one thing stopping me from toggling this is the faint concern that it's a vector for fingerprinting. I'm sure it's rare enough that nobody's checking for it though.
I use it for 95% of my browsing, with exactly the extensions you mention, but I do have to recognize it's stability is rough at times. Every now and then I run into a site that fails hard, crashing the entire UI on my Pixel 6 Pro.
Admittedly I haven't tried disabling extensions and finding the root cause. I just switch to Chrome for that task.
Interesting. The only issues I've found in the past few years is that running multiple profiles and using the picture-in-picture pop-out sometimes causes a missing cursor or small pop-up window.
No doubt Chrome's more modern stack and hefty resources help in ironing out hardware-specific quirks.
I use Firefox on mobile every day (with uBlock Origin and Tampermonkey extensions), and I don't recall it ever crashing on me. Pixel 6a, and a Xiaomi thing previously.
Same, Firefox on Android is extremely buggy for me. I experience frequent crashes because I have too many tabs open at once. Multiple times per day, I have to restart the app because the theme will bug between light and dark, which makes some of the UI text unreadable. And sometimes when I restart, I lose some of my most recent tabs for some reason. Very frustrating, but Firefox Sync and extension support are essential for me, so I deal with it.
By the way, I actually use Fennec from F-Droid and not Firefox from the Google Play Store, if that matters.
FWIW I also use Fennec from F-Droid and I'm getting very slow behaviour and crashes with lots of tabs open (between 10-30). I don't have the theme change or tabs missing though.
I've been meaning to try different Firefox distributions though because switching away from Firefox isn't really an option for the reasons you've stated.
On the contrary. Chrome will push out Safari on iOS. Lazy web devs will do the rest. It will usher in a glorious era of Chrome/Google/Alphabet dominance, with Google accounts becoming unavoidable. All hail the personalized ad!
I use Firefox Focus on Android. I don’t really care for most articles I open on my phone, usually a quick look will do, so whenever I close it or it automatically closes all tabs I’m not in the least worried.
I never used Chrome, so i don't know if it has a picture-in-picture player. But if it doesn't, you are really living in the past. It's so incredibly convenient.
p.s.: I googled, there is an extension that does the same for Chrome, but not natively.
I thought that feature was pointless when I first learned of it, but I've found myself using it from time to time. It often gets in the way of whatever else I'm doing, but it's generally pretty easy to work around.
It's no substitute for a second monitor, but it's better than nothing sometimes.
I recently stumbled upon some content with a horrible JavaScript watermarking abomination slapped on top (https://www.vdocipher.com/). They basically overlay the video player with random white strings that are just prominent enough to be annoying.
One click of the picture-in-picture button and those watermarks were completely gone.
Dunno that I’d find much use in that. Either you’re watching the video (in which case you don’t want other crap distracting you) or you’re not (in which case you don’t want the video in a corner distracting you).
Maybe I’m just from an older “I can only do one thing at a time lol” generation.
Great question! I'd never actually checked, but opening up the SQLite database, it looks encrypted. I see a table `batch_upload_items` full of ciphertexts.
I'm running the old Python sync server for the time being.
Sync can be self-hosted but the equally necessary auth-service is centralised at Mozilla. This does not make sense from a technical perspective and is reason for me to not use Firefox sync. I used to run is predecessor and liked the services it provided so I'd like to run the whole current stack as well but alas.
Gecko is my least favorite feature of Firefox because it doesn't properly handle websites like github where it doesn't show the full page forcing you to reopen the page in a new tab and close the bugged one. If Firefox doesn't have the resources to properly handle common sites they should just I switch to Blink to leverage a better maintained browser engine. It would also let Firefox invest more resources into differentiating their browser instead of just doing duplicate work.
Would you have more details to share? I don't experience such issues on github.
Clue: do you have some unusual addons which could change the behavior of Firefox?
I'll take your comment at face value, but implying that alternate rendering engines is just "duplicate work" instead of providing one of the few ways to fight against the full monopoly on the web by Google is plainly absurd.
>instead of providing one of the few ways to fight against the full monopoly on the web by Google is plainly absurd.
Firefox becoming a better browser and gaining market share is what will fight against a monopoly. Whether Firefox does that while using Gecko or some fork of Blink it doesn't really matter.
Plus worth mentioning that Firefox has native support for real user stylesheets with own origin layer, just as specified by standards. It is userConent.css file in the "chrome" folder in the profile directory. Slightly cumbersome compared to Stylus' provided "UserCSS" injections, but I think it is super important for any user agent to keep this functionality that is by the way required for CSS2.1+ compliance, and UAAG [1]
And also, to my knowledge, Firefox is one of few browsers that lets you (still) hack its interface ("chrome") through css (userChrome.css in aforementioned folder). [2]
Which controls do you want to remove? Can't you do that through the customize toolbar? I'm removing the toolbar and the sidebar header with the following userChrome:
/* to hide the native tabs */
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse;
}
/* to hide the sidebar header */
#sidebar-header {
visibility: collapse;
}
I didn't ask to remove controls. I referred to customizing controls to the level you could as of Firefox 2016. Or like you could do in Super Metroid (1992). For example, if I want shift-J to move to the left tab, and shift+K to move to the right.
As of now, extensions can kind of customize this like before, they just don't do it in a fully general way (like you'd get from a supported settings feature). The extensions will only apply after a given tab's page has loaded. So if I want to go left three tabs, I will get stuck on any tab which needs to reload, or doesn't have a page loaded, or any number of exception.
So, bottom line, I can't customize controls in a general sense anymore.
I agree it is a nuisance and I also am looking back to Keyconfig days with ton of nostalgia, but I've learnt to somehow overcome this in general with third party key remapping, in my case pretty basic AutoHotkey directives that simply translates "my" key combinations to "theirs" keyboard shortcuts. Can be possibly "scoped" only for given app, yet I have ended up leaving these mappings global, since they mostly make sense for any application in general.
For example I like to be able to have two distinct "close tab and focus left" and "..right" shortcuts, so I set every app to ditch MRU switching of tabs and always "close to right" (Ctrl+W, not remapped) and then have other (Ctrl+Shift+W) combination set to fire up Ctrl+Shift+PgUp (what moves active tab to the left in most apps) and then Ctrl+W what closes it natively, so new active tab is the closed one's former left neighbour.
; Firefox "close tab to the left"
; relies on about:config browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose=false
; (that ensures ^w will always select → RIGHT
; #IfWinActive, ahk_class MozillaWindowClass
; close to left
; this will effectively override the dreaded ctrl+shift+w close window
^+q::
^+w::
sendInput,^+{pgUp} ; = swap current tab with left neighbour
sleep,5
sendInput,^w ; = close current tab
return
; close to right (default)
;^w::
;sendInput,^w ; = close current tab
return
; #IfWinActive
The same shenanigan is doing (also global) mouse gesture for me (StrokesPlus, the olden one).
In addition to all of the reasons so many have mentioned, my favorite reason is this setting which allows me to easily use my preferred fonts on all websites: Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above
De-selecting the box and specifying my preferred fonts is the absolute first setting I change on every Firefox installation.
I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite. Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators.
I think more recent benchmarks showed that Firefox became faster than Chrome, although I'm not keeping a close eye on it and I agree with you that it's arbitrary.
For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.
Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.
I agree. I would also suggest occasionally checking out the other browsers like Opera and Vivaldi because they often have a surprising feel and feature set. Vivaldi in particular has a very nice RSS/Atom feed reader built into it, and Opera tends to be very fast.
(Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)
I try Orion once in a while when my Firefox configuration breaks a website. I actually enjoy it and appreciate the zero telemetry and functionality with both Google and Firefox plugin marketplaces. It’s also great for my laptop’s battery life. Firefox can drain that quickly depending on which tabs I keep open.
In my opinion, Chrome is more polished (no pun intended). Just the little things that allow me to work faster, whether the browser itself is faster or not. I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome.
> I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome
I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias.
That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you.
It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.
I use Firefox as a secondary browser on my Macs and primary browser on Windows and Linux, but I agree. It lacks polish, and its UI feels “off” in ways that are difficult to articulate.
It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.
I still need to use Chrome for YouTube when I'm on my Windows 11 desktop unfortunately. YouTube in FF causes weird issues with my monitor turning on and off after I've been watching YT for more than like 20 min. It gets into a state where any new windows I open or close cause the screen to turn off then on. I have no idea where to even begin diagnosing what's going on. This behavior seemingly goes away when I run YT in chrome and everything else in FF.
Same, I don't know what it is but firefox locks up whenever I try to watch youtube on my laptop. It's only my windows laptop too. My linux laptop, and windows desktop at work are fine.
I and my coworkers have recently switched from WebEx to Meet in the last month (thank goodness), and all found meet unbearable on ff. The most common issue is audio simply going out a few minutes in until you refresh. These issues, for whatever reason, don't happen on chrome, so we all keep both installed (except the regular chrome users).
For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.
Unrelatedly, I use Chrome for websites where I need to be logged into a Google account (gmail, youtube, google docs, google maps, etc.) and Firefox for everything else. I like keeping the two activities separate.
I think this mpre could be a graphic driver problem. Test update to the latest from your pc manufacturer or your graphic card manufacturer (they could differ).
I have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.
The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.
imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.
These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.
Very strange. I run Zoom constantly in FF - my company does several events a week that I edit, so i’m thick in the weeds on zoom’s site doing admin/recording management stuff. Almost 3 years on zoom’s site almost every single day, never had to swap browsers. Mac Studio if that matters.
If I record correctly, Mozilla has said that like 97% of all problems people has is with problems is due to extensions, not Firefox. '
When you have a site not working as expected, start Firefox in "Troubleshoot Mode" (alt-key then in the menu at the top Help > Troubleshot mode) that starts Firefox with addons turn off. If the site works, restart and turn of addons one by one to you see which one creates the problem.
I unfortunately do not have a running list. The one that made me drop Firefox last time was the mermaid.js docs site. None of the sidebar navigation was clickable but only on Firefox, the same issue did not appear on Safari or Chrome. It appears they have since fixed that issue as I retested and it appears fine.
The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.
Often people forgot they have installed an obscure exstension in Firefox and that is breaking the site, trying another browser it works, concluding that Firefox must be the problem, while it was the extension. That is also why people usually cannot reproduce the problem later or give concrete examples.
I, similar to the parent, have very few issues on either my computers or phones. I run Firefox on several different OS's and I just don't have the issues you mention.
Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using?
Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!
Google Images has problems with Firefox. If previewing several related pictures, the back button of the browser doesn't bring you back to the last image, but to somewhere else.
The most recent ones that I ran into seem to have been fixed based on a quick check. mermaid.js docs site was one of them where nothing on the page was clickable (I think Firefox was rendering an invisible div over the entire page) but this issue wasn't present in Chrome or Safari. That appears to have been fixed. Examples are hard to provide since they almost always get fixed but in the moment its enough pain to always get me to drop Firefox.
If it always getting fixed shortly after, it probably means something is going on in your settings or in the background that is interfering at the time you are trying to access them. Just my two cents. I know when I run proton vpn, little snitch, my various extensions, etc. one of them is always the culprit no matter what browser I use.
If it gets fixed quickly, it was probably an issue with the particular website or a plugin of yours rather than Firefox's issue. People are fast to "conclude" it must be Firefox. You should also test in a private tab with no plugins enabled. That might very well also fix the issue.
Honestly? No. If I do it's on the order of "once in a year", and usually only sites that are doing something specifically quirky, like particular types of webgpu demos or somesuch.
Oh interesting. I actually find custom docs sites (mermaid.js was the most recent one for me) seem to be the ones that break most commonly for me in Firefox but work in Chrome and Safari.
I've been using Firefox as a daily driver for four years and have not run into a single site that was truly "unusably" broken except perhaps some Google-published tech demo for a new webgpu feature.
I've occasionally run into relatively minor visual issues (I think from before the :has pseudo-class was made generally available in FF) but I cannot think of a single instance where a site was unusable and then worked when I tried it in Chrome.
The only reason websites break on Firefox for me is that I break them myself with uBlock Origin and NoScript. >:D I'd rather have them broken than put up with their repugnant bullshit. The rare time I need a site to work pristinely for some reason, I begrudgingly pull out my (mostly) vanilla Chrome though.
I use Firefox as my daily driver. There are in fact some websites that don't work on it, but it is rarely anything mainstream. My example is the website 3M provides for doing medical code grouping. Probably less than 0.01% of the internet uses it, but it only works on Chrome and then just barely.
* Recording in web client of Duolingo does not work on Firefox, only in chrome.
* Webserial for flashing esp for example is not supported
* Webauth took forever to be supported (still not sure it's fully supported)
But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.
> I don't see why I would want to use anything else
I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important.
Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't.
The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX.
I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.
To be fair, Apple is a bit hostile towards open source developers. I can write windows and linux software from both windows and linux, but to write apple software I need a mac and a developer account that costs money. If firefox depends on patches from the community, they will receive less patches for macos features because of this asymmetry.
Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team.
I use Firefox as my daily driver on my personal and work computers with no issues. I guess YMMV there. I haven’t used chrome for about 3 years now. I keep a chromium browser around o just for testing things across browsers, but I never really need it.
As a fervent long-time Firefox user I would add that currently there are lots of default settings of freshly installed Firefox that are (for me) utterly wrong. And it feels like a sad trend. Last time I tried to use freshly installed Firefox it felt like a completely different browser than my Firefox with more than a decade old profile. Tabbing was wrong, URL bar behaviour was scary. All can be set back to (subjectively) sane state, what is good, but I really grieved poor folks who just decided to try this browser for the first time and were immediately "welcomed" by such disputable UX.
And I don't mind dated UX of bookmarks manager, I even think that compared to other browsers it is the most usable one.
"At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite."
Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment.
"Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators."
Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome.
Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.
One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this.
What is "real" privacy.
There is no small amount of telemetry by default in Firefox, far more than Chrome. Unless one changes each of these settings, Mozilla collects data about Firefox users. Defaults can only be changed by editing the source and compiling Firefox. Almost no one does this.
Telemetry and Google as a default search engine are two different things. Also Telemetry doesn't collect any personal data, it's used for anonymous Firefox usage statistics to improve their product. And it's something Firefox asks you to opt in/out when you install Firefox.
What is telemetry. What is its function. Its function is to share information with Mozilla. Without telemetry, Mozilla does not have access to this information.
But what if the computer user does not care to share information with Mozilla.
Information such as:
(a) IP address
(b) the software is used/when the user is online
(c) the user's preferred websites
(d) how the software is used
(e) settings the user changes or does not change
and so on.
This is information sharing with Mozilla by default. It is not "opt-in". It is "op-out".
Note the difference between (a) the user making changes to Firefox and compiling her own customised version and (b) hoping that someone else compiles a custom version and makes all the user's preferred changes to the source and removes all the defaults that the user wants removed. Option (a) offers the computer user some control. Option (b) is completely outside the control of the computer user.
The best one can do with option (b) is hope that someone managing a "fork" has addressed all their concerns.
Is having control useful for "real privacy". Is it useful for data collection and surveillance. Who should have control.
Firefox has over 37 million lines of code. The compiled program requires hundreds of megabytes of storage space. Based on LOC and binary size it is larger than the Linux kernel. Compiling Firefox on "average" computers will take hours and will require a powerful computer. It is not an easy process and can easily fail due to its numerous dependencies.
I use a text-only browser that compiles in less than a minute on an older, underpowered computer to a 1.2 MiB static binary. There are no mandatory dependencies. It is from this browser that I type and submit this reply.
> I don't see why I would want to use anything else.
I am back again to remind people that profiles suck on Firefox, container tabs are not a great solution, and there are tons of extensions that Chrome has that Firefox doesn't.
So just 3 very simple examples of why someone would use Chrome over Firefox.
Containers for isolation between sites + treestyletabs (vertical tab bar) are the two features that makes me miss Firefox every time I try a different one. Other features are just a plus on top of that for me.
The salary for the CEO of Mozilla is 6.9 million USD (almost 7 million). They fired developers to save money, and put all the money saved into the CEO's salary. I don't see Mozilla getting better anytime soon.
Most recent layoffs (i.e. what I can easily search for) was 250 heads, just for easy numbers if we say they were all (or on average) earning $100k, then if they got rid of the CEO position entirely.. Mozilla could've kept 69 of them and only laid off 181 (plus CEO).
Is this still a valid complaint since they have a new interim CEO? I think we should wait and see what Laura Chambers does and then the new pick after this year.
I'd love to use FIrefox but I haven't found how to get around Google's on-purpose slowing down of their products (which I have to use for work) when running inside Firefox.
Or maybe it's good that HN doesn't support punycode so that you can know immediately that you're visiting an IDN domain name, and people don't try to sneak in submissions with IDF homograph similarities to troll or pretend to be a site that they're not.
Indeed so, but it would be amusing to see someone try. More likely someone would register a $11 throw away .com or .net domain to host a temporary httpd and post as a joke with some hand crafted satire of a new tech product, which has lots of potential.
I'm glad that Hacker News, the site for hackers, displays the domain name, and not the rendered display version of the domain name. Other places can and should do it differently, it's the right choice here.
But I can't read the ASCII encoding. It's gibberish. It tells me nothing about which site the article is from. It's unintelligible. You might as well not show anything at all.
I can't understand why you think the underlying ASCII encoding should be used, instead of the Unicode domain that actually gets rendered in the browser's address bar.
That makes as much sense as saying non-ASCII characters in the comments section should be displayed as raw ASCII bytes instead of correctly interpreted as UTF-8 characters. Or that domains shouldn't even be displayed as letters but just as sequences of numbers that are the code points.
The whole point of a domain name is to be semantically meaningful. Otherwise we'd just use IP addresses.
In the comments, UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it (although you'll notice that some characters are filtered out, emoji most of all).
In a domain name, punycode is the encoding. The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. Also, rendering it into unicode is a vector for attacks. So it's the wrong choice here, where no one wants to deal with the aggravation of knowing that confusables can be slipped into domain names at any time.
> The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see.
But it's not something we should see. It's terrible UX for the reasons I presented. I don't ever want to see the underlying gibberish in a context where I'm reading and commenting on the web.
This is a forum for discussing news articles from sites. Gibberish is not what you ever want to see.
And the idea of being a vector for attacks doesn't hold water. Yes it's true in a theoretical sense, but anything can be a vector for attacks. If the Unicode version of the domain name is safe enough for major browsers to display in the address bar, then it's safe enough to display to the even more tech-savvy HN readership.
(Also your comment seems to misunderstand the analogy between UTF-8 and Punycode. You say "UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it" -- but the point is HN doesn't display it. HN displays Unicode characters, not the underlying UTF-8 bytes. Which is the same way you want to display Unicode characters for a domain name, not the underlying Punycode bytes.)
Maybe I'm just fooling myself, but the main reason I use firefox and linux and a bunch of other FOSS tools is that they feel like a gift. There is no ulterior motive. Just honest to goodness software that makes your life better.
I also like paying for software and content. When people provide you with valuable tools, they should get compensated.
But, the middle ground of "free" but not free is not a happy place in my mind.
On desktop, FF supports the best vertical nested tab tree I have seen. What I’ve seen on chrome is laughably amateurish with huge chunks of wasted space due to unmodifiable(?) padding elements
Tree style tabs is more stable and performant but also has a few nice addons (TST Colored Tabs being one of my favs). Sideberry can be infinitely customized but I found it to be extremely slow with 100+ tabs across multiple windows.
5233 Sidebery tabs here, in a single window/profile. Multiple Sidebery "panels". I am simultaneously running a few other Firefox instances with their own Sidebery extensions and at least hundreds of tabs each.
I will not defend this use model to any skeptics, but FWIW I have no performance issues!
Sidebery lets you set colors on tabs explicitly, or by pattern. I use this sparingly but it's very useful when I do.
To get it that way takes a bit of code in the advanced options, and tinkering with a user definition file in FF to remove the top tab bar, but it's worth it.
The other killer feature of FF for me is the ability to containerize domains and control how cross-domain containerization occurs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-wi...). My interactions with google (for example) never leak out of my google container, so my search queries or browsing aren't explicitly linked to my google account, because I do that outside my google container. Want to watch a video on yt without it tanking your recommendations? Do it outside the google container.
Of course there are a lot of other ways for google to infer it's "me", so I don't know if this is pure security theater or it actually hinders them building my profile. Either way, it's nice to be able to explicitly determine when and where my google profile is built as I traverse the web.
I like Tab Center Reborn, then use userChrome.css to hide the native tabs.
I also set the preference browser.compactmode.show=true to enable the "compact density" in the customize toolbar section. Good use of screen real estate with these changes.
> Still, I like the idea of using a browser from a company that does not want to access my data on their own servers.
Mozilla's motives alone for creating a web browser are why I trust FF. I don't like the idea of Chrome subsisting (to the point it's their actual business model) on my personal info
I use it on Ubuntu coze it happens to be the default browser and there's nothing wrong with it.
On Windows I install Chrome, though. Android usually comes with Chrome as well so I stick with that. Only some apps seem to open the "built in" Xiaomi browser which is a piece of crap almost as stinky as Facebook app, which again absolutely must use it's terrible own browser implementation if I happen to click on some link (which I learned not to because of how terrible the experience is).
I use Firefox continuously since year ~2004, when it was called Firebird. The only time I invoke Chrome is to check if a web page is broken on just Firefox or broken for all. I love all the customization options that Firefox allows, unlike the bland and locked-down Chrome.
Duckduckgo browser for Android was the only one I could run on an old Nexus after I lost my reg phone. I kept using it on the new replacement phone and it nicely blocks all embedded social media junk letting you individually select what you want to see like one of those lazy news stories where it's a dozen tweets embedded.
Hell yes. TST got me by, it was okay.. but kinda of a mess? This is a nice alternative at first test and glance. I also like that unloaded tabs are sorta ghosted out.
Lately, on my older computer, I've been unloading a lot more? Similar to closing and reopening your browser with tab restoration (restores tabs, doesn't _load_ tabs). Or.. similar to about:unloads and clicking a button a bunch.
May as well link it here, I didn't put it on the store yet
I use Firefox across all my devices, they are seamlessly synced. To be honest, the sole reason I use FF is because I don't want to be part of Googles monopoly, and because FF just works.
My killer feature is sharing tabs from my phone to desktop. With Chrome I think it's possible only when logged in to their spy centre, with Safari+Linux it is impossible.
I hate that no one has yet made a third party tab sharing system. I don't think it would be rocket science to have an app you can "share" URLs with which sends it elsewhere. I remember years ago while shopping for browsers that Firefox was the only one with this feature, which boggles the mind. Brave last I tried didn't support it.
Not sure what you mean, but you can click the URL, then click on Share, then select "Send to devices". In a way, it works better than Firefox, because the list of active devices is more up to date. On the other hand, it can have latency, but I noticed latency in Firefox's sharing too.
Also, you can go to the Menu, then click on "Recent Tabs", which will show you the tabs on other devices.
318 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] thread> Mozilla develops their own browser engine
This is key. Without Mozilla we are aproaching monopoly as Safari aproaches gradually Internet Explorer.
So it's like Google wearing a mask.
Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"
Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide diversification and non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money that there would be screaming if they tried)"
except oops all corporate politics are the same so the politically motivated feel-good crap from Mozilla is exactly the same as the politically motivated feel-good crap from every other corporation and so it's all just a waste of time and money and effort that COULD as you put it "provide diversification" instead, if Mozilla was competently run
most of them where not
especially if you look at resource distributions
Like tab containers, browser sync, firefox SSO, VR, FirefoxOs, Pocket, the send file thing, relay, VPN, privacy preserving Translation, TTS, reader mode, pdf.js.
Non of them are "politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions" but bets to diversification (which also mostly failed for one reason or another) (and yes Pocket contains political motivated nonsens in it's recommendation system, but by itself isn't a politically motivated features, but a feature I would want to see more of deeper integrated into FF, just REALLY without the recommendation system and a somehow more natural part-of-FF felling UI/UX).
I mean sure that color theme nonsense was politically motivated feel-good nonsense. But using that as point to get hung up on is exactly what the OP comment meant, people tend to be very selective about remembering things so that they fit their narrative.
I didn’t know about Text to Speech (TTS) but personally wouldn’t have much use for it. The other things I didn’t recognise is VR. I’m guessing this refers to Firefox Reality on the Oculus Go VR Headset² (which seems to be no longer available).
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
² https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-reality...
yes, through not limited to the Oculus
and it kinda folded Hubs (https://hubs.mozilla.com/) into it
and and I think there was a bit of additional research level stuff never ending up in user hands
but both are somewhat dead, idk. if Firefox Reality still works with any VR headset at all (it might still work with non standalone headset usage) and Hubs is shutting down end of March, a community version still exist (Hubs ~= somewhat like VRChat from the idea but not as VR specific and just less interesting in general)
same for most other things they are either dead or fizzled out (and some are stables, but don't bring users, like pdf.js)
One thing I forget to mention is FF does a lot of work to reduce fingerprint-ability of existing interfaces (while trying to avoid breaking websites by changing/breaking existing interfaces, like some other more privacy focused browsers do). A bunch of this is done in context for the tor-browser but also benefit normal FF. Sadly you using FF ads more information to the fingerprint then any of the protections due to better fingerprint protection (something which is true for any form of privacy protection not used en mass by every one).
- Rust
- LetsEncrypt (collaboration)
- Opus (collaboration)
- AV1 (collaboration)
- Mozilla Common Voice database
- FirefoxOS
- MozillaVPN
- Lockwise
- Relay
- Bugzilla
- Servo
- Pocket
- MDN
- The VR projects - even if you think they're dumb they're hardly political feel-good stuff.
- The new privacy monitoring services
- The Scroll partnership (defunct because Twitter bought them and destroyed it)
Saying Firefox is Google wearing a mask is some wild conspiracy theory.
Google is a better steward of their default position than Microsoft was, by a mile, so far.
But the web and the internet is more important than Google.
Use Firefox. :)
Chrome is doing the "I make my own web standards and push them through, ups now my feature is standard incompatible so I try to force change the upcoming standard just before it gets committed" thing IE had done in the past (it's e.g. the main reason why you sometimes end up with CORS issues on FF, the site isn't standard compatible as it doesn't handle a certain thing the standard requires from websites but due to a last minute exception for chrome doesn't require browsers to enforce).
And Safari does the "I don't adopt new standards forever and have strange bugs" IE think. Funnily like IE there are a lot of devs which swear that it has no strange bug problem (because they mainly use libraries developed on/for or at least tested with safari, but if you use some more newer tech it Safari support can be quite costly).
The only time new features were released was when IE or Netscape pushed them.
I think people make too much of Safari lagging in the adoption of standards. Yes, they lag behind on what Chrome is pushing but they're also ahead on other features, like color spaces.
I'm familiar with Safari strange bugs but it's usually while I'm testing with VoiceOver so I have fewer occasions to notice bugs with Chrome or Firefox, which don't work as well with VoiceOver overall.
I think of Safari being the new IE because it's not as evergreen as other browsers; old but still usable iPhones and iPads can't run the current version and aren't allowed to run anything else. Thus, developers have more reason to care about what a browser from 2+ years ago supports.
This is the first time I've ever heard someone say this. The overwelming sentiment is that safari is leagues behind, lacks features, lacks performance is has the worst standards support of all common browsers.
What areas are you referring to?
All we ever did at my jobs, when people complained "it doesn't work on safari" is put up a banner for safari users pointing them to either the app-store for our app, or to the fact their browser is not supported.
I've only ever gotten complaints from safari users that stuff was broken (It wasn't, their browser just did stuff wrong/differently/not-yet)
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
It currently mentions "Google" a number of times, along with "Microsoft", "eBay", "AdMarketplace", "Cloudflare", "Comcast", "Adjust", "Fastly", "our partners", and other entities.
I think a lot of people believe that Firefox respects its users' privacy more than it actually does.
They may be surprised to learn how many, and which, third-parties might be involved when using Firefox.
No more 404s in dev tools for local websites, thanks!
Admittedly I haven't tried disabling extensions and finding the root cause. I just switch to Chrome for that task.
No doubt Chrome's more modern stack and hefty resources help in ironing out hardware-specific quirks.
By the way, I actually use Fennec from F-Droid and not Firefox from the Google Play Store, if that matters.
I've been meaning to try different Firefox distributions though because switching away from Firefox isn't really an option for the reasons you've stated.
Now browsers will be allowed to use their custom engine (they were forced to all use Safari up until now), so thank you EU for the new DMA!
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/198
p.s.: I googled, there is an extension that does the same for Chrome, but not natively.
It's no substitute for a second monitor, but it's better than nothing sometimes.
One click of the picture-in-picture button and those watermarks were completely gone.
Maybe I’m just from an older “I can only do one thing at a time lol” generation.
I don't. I still neuter Firefox (LibreWolf, mostly.) and disable all the sync nonsense.
I'm running the old Python sync server for the time being.
https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-...
See https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139.
(I am a big user of Github on Firefox for android and I can't reproduce) thanks
Firefox becoming a better browser and gaining market share is what will fight against a monopoly. Whether Firefox does that while using Gecko or some fork of Blink it doesn't really matter.
Many more people should be using it.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hdr-support-for-windows...
And on another comment, kkim continues to say
> Please keep your fingers crossed - we'd love to send improvements your way as soon as we can.
- User Styles: I can customize pretty much everything about the browser UI using CSS.
- Containers: Shared history, form data, bookmarks,etc. But containerized cookies.
- Separate search field next to the address bar.
Plus worth mentioning that Firefox has native support for real user stylesheets with own origin layer, just as specified by standards. It is userConent.css file in the "chrome" folder in the profile directory. Slightly cumbersome compared to Stylus' provided "UserCSS" injections, but I think it is super important for any user agent to keep this functionality that is by the way required for CSS2.1+ compliance, and UAAG [1]
And also, to my knowledge, Firefox is one of few browsers that lets you (still) hack its interface ("chrome") through css (userChrome.css in aforementioned folder). [2]
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/NOTE-UAAG20-Reference-20151215/#s... [2] https://twitter.com/myfonj/status/1387584962354982912
Not the controls, though. For that you’d need Firefox 2016.
As of now, extensions can kind of customize this like before, they just don't do it in a fully general way (like you'd get from a supported settings feature). The extensions will only apply after a given tab's page has loaded. So if I want to go left three tabs, I will get stuck on any tab which needs to reload, or doesn't have a page loaded, or any number of exception.
So, bottom line, I can't customize controls in a general sense anymore.
For example I like to be able to have two distinct "close tab and focus left" and "..right" shortcuts, so I set every app to ditch MRU switching of tabs and always "close to right" (Ctrl+W, not remapped) and then have other (Ctrl+Shift+W) combination set to fire up Ctrl+Shift+PgUp (what moves active tab to the left in most apps) and then Ctrl+W what closes it natively, so new active tab is the closed one's former left neighbour.
The same shenanigan is doing (also global) mouse gesture for me (StrokesPlus, the olden one).De-selecting the box and specifying my preferred fonts is the absolute first setting I change on every Firefox installation.
For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.
401 - Chrome
446 - Firefox
546 - Safari
202 ± 4.7 - Chrome
184 ± 5.0 - Firefox
171 ± 2.6 - Safari
511 - Chrome without any extensions
433 - Clean firefox install
500 - Clean edge install
On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM
Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.
(Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)
Any non OSS browser makes me feel weird. The amount of trust you place in a browser is insane.
I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias.
That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you.
It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.
It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.
It was my only reason to launch Chrome on my job laptop and it's been six months that I use Google Meet daily on FF without issue.
For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.
The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.
imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.
These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.
zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video..
imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect.
It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..
On imascientist.org.uk I don't see a sign up button, only login.
When you have a site not working as expected, start Firefox in "Troubleshoot Mode" (alt-key then in the menu at the top Help > Troubleshot mode) that starts Firefox with addons turn off. If the site works, restart and turn of addons one by one to you see which one creates the problem.
The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.
It works fine for me.
Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using?
Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!
I've occasionally run into relatively minor visual issues (I think from before the :has pseudo-class was made generally available in FF) but I cannot think of a single instance where a site was unusable and then worked when I tried it in Chrome.
But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.
* duolingo.com (mic does not work) * mediatest.webex.com * webserial in general
I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important.
Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't.
The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX.
I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.
Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team.
For what it's worth, Firefox on KDE is fine.
And I don't mind dated UX of bookmarks manager, I even think that compared to other browsers it is the most usable one.
I wish it was! Unfortunately it's not.
Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment.
"Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators."
Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome.
Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.
What is "real" privacy.
There is no small amount of telemetry by default in Firefox, far more than Chrome. Unless one changes each of these settings, Mozilla collects data about Firefox users. Defaults can only be changed by editing the source and compiling Firefox. Almost no one does this.
"One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this."
There are some popular Firefox forks that have several improvements over security and privacy. Check LibreWolf and Waterfox for example.
But what if the computer user does not care to share information with Mozilla.
Information such as:
(a) IP address
(b) the software is used/when the user is online
(c) the user's preferred websites
(d) how the software is used
(e) settings the user changes or does not change
and so on.
This is information sharing with Mozilla by default. It is not "opt-in". It is "op-out".
Is having control useful for "real privacy". Is it useful for data collection and surveillance. Who should have control.
Firefox has over 37 million lines of code. The compiled program requires hundreds of megabytes of storage space. Based on LOC and binary size it is larger than the Linux kernel. Compiling Firefox on "average" computers will take hours and will require a powerful computer. It is not an easy process and can easily fail due to its numerous dependencies.
I use a text-only browser that compiles in less than a minute on an older, underpowered computer to a 1.2 MiB static binary. There are no mandatory dependencies. It is from this browser that I type and submit this reply.
I am back again to remind people that profiles suck on Firefox, container tabs are not a great solution, and there are tons of extensions that Chrome has that Firefox doesn't.
So just 3 very simple examples of why someone would use Chrome over Firefox.
In my case it's Dark Reader and uBlock, and both work well in FF.
At the very least as a supplement to the money they receive from Google.
And even better, to fund more research projects, like their sponsorship of research into Rust and WebAssembly.
It's in the footer to Mozilla's website.
In actual practice, Mozilla grabs all the donations intended for FF and pools it with all donations, which then gets used for social justice programs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18b6tdp/mozilla_c...
Of their budget, what's the cost of developing Firefox?
> šime.eu
Looks like HN needs Punycode support [1] when it displays the domain name after the article title.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
That is the domain name.
I'm glad that Hacker News, the site for hackers, displays the domain name, and not the rendered display version of the domain name. Other places can and should do it differently, it's the right choice here.
I can't understand why you think the underlying ASCII encoding should be used, instead of the Unicode domain that actually gets rendered in the browser's address bar.
That makes as much sense as saying non-ASCII characters in the comments section should be displayed as raw ASCII bytes instead of correctly interpreted as UTF-8 characters. Or that domains shouldn't even be displayed as letters but just as sequences of numbers that are the code points.
The whole point of a domain name is to be semantically meaningful. Otherwise we'd just use IP addresses.
In a domain name, punycode is the encoding. The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. Also, rendering it into unicode is a vector for attacks. So it's the wrong choice here, where no one wants to deal with the aggravation of knowing that confusables can be slipped into domain names at any time.
But it's not something we should see. It's terrible UX for the reasons I presented. I don't ever want to see the underlying gibberish in a context where I'm reading and commenting on the web.
This is a forum for discussing news articles from sites. Gibberish is not what you ever want to see.
And the idea of being a vector for attacks doesn't hold water. Yes it's true in a theoretical sense, but anything can be a vector for attacks. If the Unicode version of the domain name is safe enough for major browsers to display in the address bar, then it's safe enough to display to the even more tech-savvy HN readership.
(Also your comment seems to misunderstand the analogy between UTF-8 and Punycode. You say "UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it" -- but the point is HN doesn't display it. HN displays Unicode characters, not the underlying UTF-8 bytes. Which is the same way you want to display Unicode characters for a domain name, not the underlying Punycode bytes.)
You're mistaking misunderstanding for disagreement.
We understand each other perfectly well, we simply disagree.
I also like paying for software and content. When people provide you with valuable tools, they should get compensated.
But, the middle ground of "free" but not free is not a happy place in my mind.
I will not defend this use model to any skeptics, but FWIW I have no performance issues!
Sidebery lets you set colors on tabs explicitly, or by pattern. I use this sparingly but it's very useful when I do.
To get it that way takes a bit of code in the advanced options, and tinkering with a user definition file in FF to remove the top tab bar, but it's worth it.
The other killer feature of FF for me is the ability to containerize domains and control how cross-domain containerization occurs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-wi...). My interactions with google (for example) never leak out of my google container, so my search queries or browsing aren't explicitly linked to my google account, because I do that outside my google container. Want to watch a video on yt without it tanking your recommendations? Do it outside the google container.
Of course there are a lot of other ways for google to infer it's "me", so I don't know if this is pure security theater or it actually hinders them building my profile. Either way, it's nice to be able to explicitly determine when and where my google profile is built as I traverse the web.
I also set the preference browser.compactmode.show=true to enable the "compact density" in the customize toolbar section. Good use of screen real estate with these changes.
1200 thumbs up since 2022 and 22 pages of comments. I wonder when we'll get native vertical tabs.
Mozilla's motives alone for creating a web browser are why I trust FF. I don't like the idea of Chrome subsisting (to the point it's their actual business model) on my personal info
On Windows I install Chrome, though. Android usually comes with Chrome as well so I stick with that. Only some apps seem to open the "built in" Xiaomi browser which is a piece of crap almost as stinky as Facebook app, which again absolutely must use it's terrible own browser implementation if I happen to click on some link (which I learned not to because of how terrible the experience is).
Also I use Firefox for web development tutorials because of the Mozilla docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...
Sideberry is what I use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery
Lately, on my older computer, I've been unloading a lot more? Similar to closing and reopening your browser with tab restoration (restores tabs, doesn't _load_ tabs). Or.. similar to about:unloads and clicking a button a bunch.
May as well link it here, I didn't put it on the store yet
https://github.com/shmup/firefox-tab-unloader/releases/tag/v...
This is the crux of it: https://github.com/shmup/firefox-tab-unloader/blob/main/back...
(I should point out, it unloads tabs in all windows -- this might not be a nice default but it's for me right now hehe)
I hate that no one has yet made a third party tab sharing system. I don't think it would be rocket science to have an app you can "share" URLs with which sends it elsewhere. I remember years ago while shopping for browsers that Firefox was the only one with this feature, which boggles the mind. Brave last I tried didn't support it.
Not sure what you mean, but you can click the URL, then click on Share, then select "Send to devices". In a way, it works better than Firefox, because the list of active devices is more up to date. On the other hand, it can have latency, but I noticed latency in Firefox's sharing too.
Also, you can go to the Menu, then click on "Recent Tabs", which will show you the tabs on other devices.