> Here’s something the iPhone isn’t getting anytime soon: honest-to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on your phone.
This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time.
Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it.
> With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are!
> Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
I really struggled going back to Firefox after being a Chrome user for so long, it just feels so incredibly slow in comparison - I know it's probably just perception but I couldn't shake that feeling.
I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.
I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.
Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.
I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
The article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.
Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.
Does anyone know how to reliably use Firefox from command line to take screenshots? It used to work well a few years ago but now it does not. For one, it asks that Firefox is already running and I need to kill it. This is surprising -- why can't two Firefox processes run at the same time?
I tried Firefox just a few days ago, but it didn't work out. I just missed too many things out of the box. My main browser is Vivaldi (so all the chromium goodies + privacy + made in EU). Safari comes in as a close second, I tend to use it on the go because it syncs well with my Mac and Apple throttles any other browser on iOS.
I prefer stylebot to stylus, as it doesn't require an unnecessary dance to make a specific theme and then mark it as only for the current site, before you can plop some css into the sidebar for that specific site.
It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default.
It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
I would just like to add that in my experience, "How to Firefox" is just:
- Download Firefox
- Install uBlock Origin
- Use Firebox
Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works.
The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it to the max is simply flat out wrong.
I tried transitioning to FF from Chrome several times, but it just feels so unresonsive and slow in comparison. I really wanted to, but ultimately couldn't.
On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it:
- Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input
- Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’
- Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it
- Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.
It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
Firefox was my main browser after Chrome MV3 stuff, but now I'm moving to Orion by Kagi. I found, on my Macbook M1, Firefox hog the battery a lot seen from the energy impact on Mac's activity monitor (average 12hr power >1000 compared to Orion ~350). Don't expect extensions to work well on Orion, though, but I can live with it for now.
.. and then there are panorama extensions, which ease handling a lot of tabs immensely. No other browser seems to have anything alike. No, the grouping of tabs into tabs does nothing compared to this.
This is pretty similar to my set up but I'm ready to quit Firefox because what feels like every few weeks they somehow manage to add new auto-enabled spyware.
I regularly have to turn stuff off in
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
and
"Website Advertising Preferences"
Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added:
"Suggestions from sponsors
Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions."
of course, enabled by default.
Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
The main problem Firefox has really is Mozilla. And Orion is neat but too immature and the direction Kagi is taking in general seems to be moving further away from a indie company with a single purpose. I hope they manage to steer themselves back into what got people excited about them to begin with.
I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine.
I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.
In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites.
I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome.
It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.
119 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadThis convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time.
Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it.
https://kagi.com/orion/
Edit:
> With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are!
> Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
Most extensions can be installed, but they do not actually function properly. Or, maybe only for 50%.
The most annoying part is, you do not know which extensions don't work (like content blockers, etc.)
I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.
I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.
Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.
I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default.
It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
Except on my arm-based crhomebook. There it gets confused and do not resize properly thinking is in phone format.
Also cast to chromecast is a no-go.
If it wasn't by those 2 issues I would have ditched chrome long time ago.
- Download Firefox
- Install uBlock Origin
- Use Firebox
Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works.
The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it to the max is simply flat out wrong.
On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it:
- Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input
- Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’
- Enable it and relaunch browser
- Download the latest zip file of uBlock version from github: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
- Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it
- Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.
It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
I regularly have to turn stuff off in
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
and
"Website Advertising Preferences"
Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added:
"Suggestions from sponsors Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions."
of course, enabled by default.
Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
But sure, anything but Chrome.
I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.
In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites.
I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome.
It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.