Firefox 72.0(mozilla.org) |
Firefox 72.0(mozilla.org) |
Does anyone else get bothered by this? Is there any way around this? I'm not an aesthetics person by any means but this is quite annoying. It's a fantastic browser other than this, I've been a user for as long as I can remember.
I'm sure you can probably modify userChrome and all this and I've not really tried because I'm not THAT bothered by it, but surely there should be a way to set your preferred themes for light & dark?
[1] https://imgur.com/a/t9tvbQr [2] https://i.imgur.com/GXrTw7C.png [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/9f29vr/i3_doom_co...
https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/dgth9i/automatic_dark_...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620
Basically if you have an external screen (possibly related to it being low-DPI and main screen being Retina), context menus don't work properly, if at all.
It seems it got even worse in 72 than it was in 71 - now I'm not even getting a context menu in the wrong place, it's invisible (maybe off-screen?).
Hopefully someone who works on Firefox can see this and fix it - it's making Firefox nearly unusable as is :(
I have had trouble with menu bar items where the pull-down menu will not appear on one screen but will appear on the other. That seems to be a Catalina bug.
Chrome generates the sync keys on server and has proprietary sync software.
That's it. That's all it took for me to switch. I know FF eats almost double the CPU compared to Chrome. I know 1 out of every 10 webapps will just not work in it. That's fine. I will take the security and privacy over convenience.
Just buy a better CPU.
This gets a little hard when the device you want to run FF on is a old laptop that doesn't need replacing and where battery life is more important than raw speed.
Firefox Installs non-free binaries from Cisco and Google again https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582
firefox: Safe Browsing updates fail due to insufficient quota on the Google API key https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147
Just recently I discovered DoH was activated by default now and bypassing my /etc/hosts block list without any warning. This opened me up to tracking from sites I thought I had blocked.
In all above cases the failure-modes are insecure. It's like a firewall that suddenly switches its enforcement policy from a deny-all+whitelisting to allow-all+blacklisting without properly informing users.
Totally unacceptable!
If you’re downloading compiled software from anyone, you’re trusting them to not have put nasty things in the binary. There could be lots of interesting things injected to the binaries that are not part of the open source code.
As for the safe browsing thing, that looks to be a bug specific to Debian’s Firefox-distribution, not FF itself.
And as for DoH, it’s not exactly a secret, it’s been widely reported on and featured in the release notes. If you’re technically competent to play around with `/etc/hosts`, you should be capable of reading the release notes, too.
Looks like something that was cloned from some other product and rather crudely shoehorned in. At the very least it should have been introduced after an update and given an option to opt-in to using it, rather than automatically enabling it without any notice.
We already have uorgin block and https everywhere and privacy beaver.
They just want to make their browser even more bloated.
And lets not even talk about linux distro. On my xubuntu its even slower than chromium or chrome.
Here is my advice: Invest everything on speed. Your user already know about privacy and stuff. That why less than 9% of us are left.
It’s a miracle that browsers can render all that in the seconds it usually takes them, and if Chrome is a second faster, it’s due to the billion $ company behind investing the GPD of a medium-sized country into optimizing it.
It can create, for example, a pop-out video overlay, which can be moved around and resized. It then sits over top of the other content on the page (and remains over other tabs) and will remain fixed as you scroll down the page and similar. On a site like YouTube, you could pop the video out and proceed to scroll down and interact with comments while the video plays to the side or above.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-f...
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/
They should have thought about this - it is possible to force resolve the individual domains in the NextDNS UI but that gets problematic fast.
If you just want to know how to toggle it normally in case something goes weird with one of the changes it's in the network settings part of the settings page.
edit: there is also the canary domain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21825443
What's user research?
Jokes aside, my favorite feature in Firefox is the good old-fashioned search box. I use Bing by default and repeat searches on Google or Duck Duck Go if I don't find results right away.
No. I just wanted to diversify away from Google a bit and I started with Bing because of Microsoft Rewards. I've only been getting about 50 (USD) cents per month in points though, so it's not compelling.
The times Ive tried to find things in Google because "people say it has better search", I've not had much luck. Possibly because they don't have extensive data on me and my search preferences?
I think Yahoo is backed by Bing these days? I always find its search results perfectly adequate.
Too much trouble to debug it so I opted to switch instead.
The last reason for me to keep using Safari/Chrome is gone.
I've switched to Firefox on almost every other platform (apart from iOS). with Firefox 72, I've switch to Firefox only on MacOS as well.
[0]:https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-nearly-every-...
For a moment I thought they had done this for the cookie and privacy notices. Oh how that would be amazing to move that functionality into the browser.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...
You are probably better of using Tor Browser.
I'd love for them to add a progress bar and subtitle (think youtube, netflix or prime video) in the PIP window.
If we went by this argument then browsers would have every single feature ever. Which they kinda do...
A great example is Twitch (which I would have assumed was one of the prime use/test cases). Twitch has these things they call "extensions" that streamers can add to the player of anyone watching the stream... and they pop out on hover from the right when you want to access their main settings. So instead of clicking the button to modify the extension suddenly the video is in the corner of my monitor.
That's when I decided to disable it for now :).
Edit: clarification
It is in the right click menu, under "Picture-in-Picture"
It's actually quite convenient to watch a video while you're browsing elsewhere (e.g., a passive video you aren't intentionally watching all of but also trying to do other things). I didn't think I'd use it but every once in a while it's nice.
Using an embedded youtube or other video player that doesn't let you resize? Pop it out!
Want to put a youtube vid in a corner while you do other stuff? Pop it out, switch tabs, and go about your business!
For example, I love it for Netflix so that I can watch a show while doing other things on my laptop.
Most content providers probably don't like this feature.
I was kind of skeptical about it but given that in practice all it does is display a small popout icon on video mouse-over, it's not really that annoying.
One downside is that subtitles (at least with Netflix, don't remember for YouTube) are still displayed in the original tab.
I don't know whether it's right for a browser to add that feature rather than the OS, but Ubuntu doesn't have any plans to add similar functionality so I don't really care.
As far as making it opt-in I dont really understand your reasoning. If people want to use the feature then it's there, if not then they probably won't notice anything is even different. Do you feel similarly about things like reader mode?
A native media player with youtube-dl is still king for power users.
I really dislike Twitter.
How can we tell that we got the real deal, especially if the original Firefox binary got compromised?
And no, Firefox containers are not the same, I cannot install two versions for 1pass - personal/private
Firefox also have true "profiles" but they are kind of a hack
It drives me nuts because I have things in FF that can't easily be handled by containers and I have things in Chrome that can't easily be handled by profiles.
This was a problem in recent versions, and is still a problem in version 72.
Edit: Answered by zamadatix.
i'm using the latest macos and chrome. what exactly isn't supposed to be working?
i also have firefox installed, but on macos firefox is mostly an alpha/unfinished release since years ago.
[1] Mathematically positive natural numbers are infinite. Realistically, most systems traditionally implement version numbers as sets of at least 16-bit numbers and there are 65,536 numbers to choose from, not just the first ten or so.
Perhaps there are still some minor bugs and they don't enable it by default?
And if you zoom in somehow, you cannot pan over the page because Firefox act like you are seeing full screen and trying to go back or forward in browser history.
While I still consider DuckDuckGo to be in the "not bad" category, Firefox is in the "seriously awesome" category now.
If you have been away from Firefox for a while like me, give it another shot. It won't disappoint you for sure.
HDR is very much in the list of things we want to do (especially for videos), but as you can imagine, it's not particularly trivial, and will require platform specific work, and deep changes into Firefox. On the other hand, hardware is shipping (we got some devices so that developers can start assessing the situation), and HDR content is becoming increasingly available, so we're trying to figure out what it will take to do it properly.
browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
Edit - default for this config variable could be platform specific; the above is based on Windows 10. I'll check on my MacBook tonight.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/12/03/firefox-p...
And there really needs to be an easy way to switch profiles. Firefox has had profiles for basically forever, but it's much easier to switch profiles in Chrome.
For me its been fantastic.
Me too! I'm not as bothered by software-politics as many of the commentators on here (I don't hate Facebook, and worked there for four years; I don't hate ads; I don't worry too much about trafficking and privacy...) but Chrome fucking with the URL was a bridge too far. I switched to Firefox and when Google walked back their hiding-the-URL business, I never bothered switching back, because I didn't trust them anymore.
Companies take note: users' trust that you won't arbitrarily change their workflow in annoying ways is hard to win back.
If you're into privacy-conscious search engines and want one that's not susceptible to blanket FISA warrants[0], check out either Qwant[1] or SwissCows[2].
[0] - DuckDuckGo's address is in Pennsylvania - 20 Paoli Pike, Paoli, PA 19301.
[1] - https://www.qwant.com
[2] - https://swisscows.ch/
France has a more permissive surveillance regime than the US[0], and as a foreign (US) user I have no recourse if they spy on me.
Furthermore, here are some quotes from qwant:
>We do not use any cookies or other advertising tracers to create your profile for commercial purposes. This means that you can use Qwant with confidence, we will never try to establish your psychological or commercial profile to sell it to third parties, here or elsewhere. [1]
Note the "for commercial purposes" in the first sentence, and the "to sell it to third parties" in the second. These are weasel clauses.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/france-big-bro...
[1] https://betterweb.qwant.com/5-reasons-to-be-brave-and-choose...
In the console I get a warning and an error:
> Content Security Policy: Couldn’t process unknown directive ‘script-src-elem’
> TypeError: browserLanguage is undefined
EDIT: I right click the search box and make qw and sw keywords for them.
EDIT2: I'm just looking for a functional google alternative.
I don’t necessarily mean that good or bad. Just interesting how... different it is. Seems good if you know your thug exists already and someone approved it for their results.
Also >France
I've found it's extremely valuable to be developing sites in Firefox using the dev tools simply to help catch issues that the rest of the team ignores as they're all stuck on Chrome. Fights monocultures by default!
You won't be worse off, it isn't a big effort to get used to FF devtools, but you must accept a learning curve if you want to switch.
That being said, I still switched back to Firefox and ddg after I close devtools.
Really like the ability to outline flexbox and grid elements.
Rather than having to remember all the small changes you made, you can just copy and paste the script out (or even just view what you changed).
I generally like the FF tools better nowadays, but Chrome’s are a bit faster.
But is it good enough? Hell yes.
I have Firefox in the dock on iPhone and it's really great but random links, e.g. via messaging, get opened by Safari first.
It's still not as quick as Chrome (my laptop is not recent, not helping) but I'd rather support Mozilla.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206
It is not 100% bug free yet, though
The bug also mentions openh264 but it's BSD licensed so I'm confused as to why anyone considers it non-free.
Also read the description: there's an option to enable it, but for me at least, it was too buggy to use.
[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp..., you can log in with a github account or create one
They should be able to do this fairly easily -- two distros here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/assembly_ins...
E.g. "<lock icon> https://www.google.com/example/" would display as "<lock icon> google.com/example" until you interact with the URL.
That should probably read 'more pervasive'.
Need to first pan at least a bit vertically, then it allows horizontal panning. But yeah, clearly not a finished feature yet. Still nice to see there's progress, and it's already mostly usable with the mentioned caveats.
Thinking of it, it would even be a nice feature since we need to pan to the left of the page or zoom out completely to go back in history with touch pad in Chromium based browsers.
> Still nice to see there's progress, and it's already mostly usable with the mentioned caveats.
At least.
Next release should definitely have this double-tap and smart-zoom feature.
The only thing I missed from the ordinary Firefox on Android was that Firefox used to have a brilliant hack with the sharing option where they would show the two most frequently used options (+ a sharing button to access the rest) instead of just one or just the sharing button.
This saved me a few seconds again and again and again.
Wonder why no one else does that?
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/chrome-and-fi...
I had to get used to Chrome devtools because javascript debugging is a lot better there. For completeness sake, CSS debugging is much better in Firefox. In time, I think both will converge.
> Firefox now supports simulation of meta viewport in Responsive Design Mode.
HN discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20050173 (281 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430 (893 comments)
Of course you can also create launchers/shortcuts for Firefox with "firefox -P profilename" but again that's work you have to do on each machine you use.
Maybe make a perf switch in the console, which dumps the text without formatting or other features. Something that can handle one million lines of logs and search in it. Being able to search the logs is critical. Filtering doesn't work as I need to see the surrounding logs, what happened after. I don't need to see all one million lines at the same time though, it can be buffered to only show 100 lines above it and 100 lines below it. Chromium has such an optimization. But search is a bit slow.
I also have to keep clicking the clear button to prevent the page from freezing if the dev tools console is open when loading the page.
If other people have different preferences, that’s fine! They can keep using Chrome.
Also, even if that weren’t true, change is a cost. It’s perfectly reasonable to complain about change as being intrinsically bad without giving any other reason.
- Do they really need to see* http:// or https:// if immediately to the left is the icon which indicates secure/insecure (which is more than just "protocol is https or not")?
- Do they really care to see* if they are at www.site.com or m.site.com or site.com or do they just want to know they are at site.com which they expect to be as they make their purchase or log in?
* noting that bookmarking, copying, or editing the URL operate on the full URL and this is just a visual change otherwise
And voila now the leftmost (first) text they read is not a bunch of jargon it's the thing people look at the URL for the most.
That you couldn't think of any reason tells me you didn't try not that you disagreed with the reasons and had an actual lesson to share about why. Again: "it changed, change bad" people impossible to distinguish from "it changed, actually bad".
Maybe dropping the protocol definition in the URL is debatable, as probably 99.99% of the time in Chrome a user is going to be either http or https, but dropping a part of the hostname is unacceptable in my book.
Would dropping .com be acceptable? All a user wants to see is that they went to Google, to an average user the .com could be seen as redundant clutter as well. Might as well have the address bar show "google" or "cnn" or "facebook" in it, as clearly that's what a user cares about.
I care what I need.
A standard user was probably fine with something like AOL keywords.
You mean the strawman repeatedly trotted out by people defending shitty changes as justifications for why their shitty change is necessary? Ever wonder why so many things suck nowadays?
we had a recent dialog about it here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ecyhmr/mozilla_...
there's some cool stuff in the works but it doesnt sound like there's a plan to internalize the work into devtools but to keep it as a web app and rely on a serviceworker for "localness" - not great, imo.
You can't really get rid of the TLD without breaking the security model of the web (e.g. a lock icon and google.com is different than a lock icon and google.gtld). Would it be nice to refactor that? Probably. Is it reasonably possible at this point? No.
As you said www.example.com being functionally different from example.com was already a broken workflow, users weren't differentiating it. Continuing to display something users haven't understood for 20 years was not considered a strong enough reason to simplify the URL display now in a way that causes the same errors users were commonly making anyways.
Can "the larger group" be used as an excuse for a bad change? Sure! But so far the only reason mentioned as to WHY this change is bad is "www.site.com and site.com could technically be different sites" and I'm not sure how that is supposed to be clear regardless if www shows post load or not or how that's supposed to outweigh the advantages.
HTTP currently shows "Not secure" to the left of the URL. It's still easy to differentiate.
(I do think hiding www is stupid, but hiding http vs https is reasonable so long as they're still marked differently. Ideally http should be a more noticeable error, like it is if there's any user input box, or better yet a massive error like it is for self-signed certs and HTTPS.)
- Open new windows more quickly. Firefox feels sluggish (on Mac) even though it isn't, simply because it opens new windows far more slowly than Safari or Chrome.
- Use the platform native key store. I don't want my passwords stored unencrypted on disk. But I don't want to enter a separate master password either. I do want to use fingerprint/face unlock on mobile to reveal passwords.
- Give me a setting to autoconfirm all cookie consent requests and lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header. Cookie consent was well meaning, but it has turned out to make things worse. Let's move on.
You can disable it for all windows in all applications using a terminal command:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO
[0] http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.marcosinghof.noslowanima...
This can be done with uBlock Origin and an "annoyances" filter list such as EasyList Cookie. It doesn't actually give websites consent to use of cookies, only hides the consent form.
DNT is pretty dead, and IMHO was never a good idea in the first place. Opt-outing of invasive and unethical tracking is just weird. What about people who don't know about it? Or don't fully understand what it means?
It's almost like the Hitchhiker's Guide: "Well, you should have visited the planning department in the disused lavatory with a sign 'beware of the leopard".
I wrote some more about it over here: https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html
Maybe there should be standardized interface for accepting privacy policy and cookies, all managed in browser UI so you could set default settings and give exceptions for specific sites without cluttering website with various popups... oh wait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
Passwords are always stored encrypted when you save them in Firefox. You can read more about it here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-securely-sa...
Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...
I use I on Firefox mobile and desktop - don't know if there's a chromium version.
Almost forgot I use it which is the most positive review an add-on like this could receive.
Looks available on a gamut of different browsers.
Most of those are implemented in JS, so NoScript goes a pretty long way to fixing this. It would be nice if Firefox somehow auto-detected them, and other useless pop-overs, and nuked them.
Given that I prefer brave or bromite custom tabs (via Lynket) for short sessions on mobile (and prefer not to have long sessions on mobile at all), I generally just deal with it.
Windows open more quickly now than before. A few versions ago, it had become unbearably slow (I'm an FF user since Camino died), and I stuck to using tabs only, but 72 seems to have caught up again. I estimate that it's around 0.3s slower than Chrome on my machine.
> Use the platform native key store.
Amen to that.
I assume you mean new tabs?
That's very quick on Windows using FF 72. Interestingly that's been a long-time annoyance of mine when using Chrome on Mac - when compared to Safari which shines here.
No, I mean windows. Opening tabs is very fast.
Many of my workflows begin by opening an new empty browser window. I also tend to open links in new windows instead of tabs. I'm not a huge fan of tabs generally.
You could say once malware is executed with my credentials it's game over anyway. But I disagree with that. Having a file full of passwords stolen is far worse than than anything else, including key loggers, because it's maximum damage in a minimum amount of time.
I want to make that as difficult as possible for any attacker.
It has been my primary browser outside of work, the major reason I use Chrome now is for Chrome Dev Tools.
Also, some websites don't behave well in FF and I find that most of the time it's because of the site tracking being blocked. So not a big deal
That should pretty much kill off a lot of the notification request crap, especially if Chrome follows suit. I can envision the conversion rate massively falling off when it's no longer something right in your face.
This is fantastic! I had finally figured out I could turn this off in settings a while ago, glad it's now a default. I get so annoyed by this, annoying indeed!
In a webapp where you present user a button to activate notifiactions, when the user clicks the button seemingly nothing happens in FF72 (user is focussed on a big enable notifiactions button in the web app and may not notice that some tiny gray icon wiggled a little in the address bar).
On a big screen a button in the middle of the screen is so far away from the address bar, that you don't see any change in the address bar at all in the peripheral vision.
So yeah, web apps that don't try to force the user to enable notifications are now punished for good behavior again.
EDIT: So it's not so stupid, see below.
Do you mind me asking what your notifications are for?
These recent developments are awesome. As a frontend developer, I also find the devtools absolutely competitive with Chrome's.
The default ad- and tracker blocking is nice, I only need to use uBblock Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that), since Youtube became nearly unusable due to the massive amount of ads.
Edit: also, they are fortunately tackling two prominent annoyances of the "modern web" i.e. push notification popups (for those who don't turn the whole feature off outright in about:config) and video autoplay.
So sad that Firefox's market share is still just 9-10%. :(
Depends how much you're using it, but as it's pretty much become the primary source of entertainment in our household I decided the most practical and ethical option was to just pay for it.
Got fed up when YT showed 2 ads every 20 minutes in the middle of a classical music concert. I'm not expecting it to be ad-free, but expecting it to be less intrusive/annoying.
Think about it: it's a web browser literally built by the biggest search company in the world. The latest version of Chrome will even add Google Drive files to the omnibar search for G Suite users.
There is no excuse that they have a worse omnnibox search than Firefox.
Chrome usually works but yesterday a colleague had problems where the dialog asking which cert to use wouldn’t respond.
Firefox just works.
It’s a shame that certificates aren’t used more widely. They don’t work at all in captive portal pages on OS X or iphones :(
One thing would make this even more increadible: is there a way to set the default size and position? If the PIP feature would always start in my preferred size and position, this would be just so great.
I generally have my browser take up 3/4 of the screen with a small bit of space on the right free.
If watching a video I can drag it into this free space and continue using browser while it's playing.
Many years ago I used to use "popup video" extensions to achieve the same thing. This works much better though.
Update: Just got to try it out, seems like it indeed works now. Yay Firefox 72!
There's visual persistence of state. On Firefox, even with the trick of reducing minimum tab width, my tabs overflow and I have to click through to get different groups of tabs. It is utterly maddening and I don't know why every other browser refuses to do Chrome like tabs.
Why the continued choice to violate the first rule of UI design which is to keep things in the same place?
I often had a window open only playing a youtube video, having it be native to the browser and always on top is such a great feature.
App developers spend a lot of their time making up for the poor decisions of OS developers. A good window manager would give you tabs for free, PiP (aka an always-on-top window) for free, dark mode for free. Instead OS devs go overboard in simplifying things to the point that app devs have to pay the cost of delivering what users want.
And now this: "Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month"
I love how Google follows Firefox with these "better web experience" features but only if they don't impact their business model.
I know that the average person isn’t concerned with these things, but I spend almost all of my day in a browser, and I want it to look as good (or better) than the competition.
But, of course, you like whatever you like.
If you right click the top bar, click Customize, click the "Density" menu on the bottom, and use "Compact", the back button is the same height.
* Websites with notifications that are frequently denied by users, will lose the ability to request web notifications permissions. Users must manually enable it through Domain Settings.
There defining competition these days is between websites and iOS/Android apps, and Google’s future depends on the web not losing.
- about:config
- dom.webnotifications.enabled = false
That's it. Haven't seen one in months.
Once rendering is hardware accelerated, it makes sense to look into hardware video decoding. Doing hardware video decoding without hardware rendering roughly means we need to read back from GPU memory into main memory, composite the image in software, and then upload back to the GPU to display, which is super super inefficient.
[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where [1]: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/13799/is-webgl-...
TLDR: if js gets direct control of GPU, it can read/modify present and past screens.
Maybe after Wayland implementations get good enough, distributions will make hw acceleration work securely with wayland compositors, probably years? Just guessing.
Playing video on youtube is easy, but performance sucks due to bloated youtube website. Performance of the same video URL in empty page with video player is much better, close to that in video player with CPU only.
If you need GPU acceleration, you can use something like youtube-dl or mpv to play videos on a URL in a video player.
The question is about whether FF is finally using va-api to accelerate video codec decoding.
I wish clicking anywhere on the box would act as "play/pause", instead of requiring me to hunt down the button. And of course I wish for some visible/interactable buffer-bar, though I realize that might not be standardized across webplayers, so maybe not possible.
The only thing I use Chrome for is gaming, graphics perf is still miles better than Firefox. But I'd never trust Chrome with anything as much as a private URL or a username or password, for much the same reason I wouldn't stick my hand through the bars of a cage while visiting the zoo. Did they ever get around to fixing that opt-out password sync crap?
This is going to vary with different people. Have you heard the phrase "Default is destiny"? This is especially true for less technical people (the majority of web users).
Personally I'm not going to dabble, rather keeping to the safe and familiar, so I have to intentionally trial run something as my goto/default.
I've been using web browsers since the mid 1990's and with the exception of when I first started using them I have never only used one. These days I regularly use Chrome, FF and Safari every day for different tasks.
I'm not alone in this. When I peak at other people's computers I regularly see multiple browsers being used there as well. Even the less computer savy people know to use different browers for different websites depending on what works.
This is all to say I don't quite grasp naive understandings of the browser horse races. There is likely little actual switching going on, and the concept of market share in browsers needs to be reexamined.
But this time, the experience was a lot smoother. So it's not a natural switch which happens with time :)
I get most of my stuff working in FF so don't need to jump to Chrome most of the time but for some gnarly stuff I end up in Chrome
I switched to Firefox from Chrome a couple of months ago. The sole motivation was the fiasco that ensued after Google decided to mingle Chrome Sync login with accounts.google.com cookies - there is simply no way to sign in to Chrome Sync without creating browser cookies for the same account. I wanted the benefit of saving and syncing bookmarks and extensions across my chrome installations, but I did not want to be tracked across the web with my logged in Google identity and the Chrome changes for "Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" made it impossible. It was time to move on from Chrome.
And I have been very pleased with the new Firefox. Highly recommend it to everyone!
Netscape (1994) -> IE -> Firefox (for a long time) -> Opera (briefly, but never liked it) -> Safari (a return to the Mac platform) -> Chrome (for a long time) -> Firefox (2 months ago)
I never thought I'd return to Firefox but here I am. Browser preferences can certainly shift over time.
Yet they still have the same basic back, forward, refresh, address bar, and bookmark components. I wonder if that'll ever change. Address bars have certainly come a long way.
As someone who's been using FF since the Netscape Navigator days, I remember when people were saying similar things about Chrome and IE. Never say never.
I switched to vilvadi last year and it has been a breeze.
On mobile, I don't have any preference but I avoid firefox preview now that it has been crashing on top ranking Alexa sites. I would appreciate better tab management here too because I have to switch between 5 browsers to just manage them all without them crashing.
That's pretty much what I do in the past few years. Firefox is my primary personal browser, while Chrome is strictly for work only. Hopefully I can fully transition to Firefox for work stuff this year as almost all debugging features I used are available on Firefox. It's mostly just muscle memory that holding me back after years of using Chrome dev tools.
FF needs a “disable notifications, but lie to the website and say they’re enabled” button.
In preferences type 'notifications', click the Settings button and check the box to "Block new requests asking to allow notifications"
That was the era when majority of public opinion on Google was Do no Evil. And Google at the time can do no wrong.
I enjoy ads-free YouTube experience as I’m located in Sudan. It always surprise me the amount of ads I get when I access the internet from a different location!
- Dragging tabs didn't immediately drag out a window like in Chrome
- A crashing tabs still seemed to crash/severely slow down the browser
- Sluggishness in window opening / first open.
Luckily (for me) this still holds and I see it as an advantage over Chrome; this pulling effect is amusing to look at (and I must admit that Chrome does great job when it comes to perceived speed and "snappiness" of it) but absolutely terrible feature when it comes to usability. For example it prevents transfer of tab between two full screen windows, making this task a multi steps chore. (Even for non-fullscreen windows it's quite complicated; I've summarized it some time ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19663744)
Wish I had bookmarked the page.
Bring back P3P, with GDPR acting as the enforcement part (which was quite lacking when P3P was first proposed)? Might work quite nicely, and the support is in browsers already, it just tends to be ignored.
Of course the real solution (and the reason why GDPR introduced the banner) is for website to stop using cookies for tracking their users and thus have no reason to put the banner (you don't need the banner for technical cookies, such as the one used for logins, but only for third party profiling cookies).
The intent of the parts of GDPR which mention cookies (or, at least, what I assume the intent was) was to essentially "upgrade" the banner from a simple and largely useless notification (i.e "By using this site you agree to our use of cookies") to one of informed consent (i.e "Please click accept or deny the use of cookies to continue using this site").
Interestingly, as far as I am aware, no site or company has ever been taken to court or even fined for not using a cookie banner, despite some websites publically declaring they won't use it[0].
So if you hate to put cookie banners onto a site, just stick with storing only strictly necessary cookies without data that identifies your users and you are fine.
The problem is, many people don’t even know what cookies their own site stores with their users and they store a ton of tracking cookies on their user’s devices.
I can see why that prevents a browser from auto-accepting all cookies, but how in the world does this logic apply to me if I want to deny consent to 100% of the websites to use cookies?
Set the default on the browser to deny all consent, and show the cookie notification somewhere unobtrusive, the same way it was done for notifications.
With Firefox no matter how many tabs I have open, they all remain usable. There's also "% name" keyword search in address bar that finds open tabs, and check out Tree Style Tabs extension.
There's no tab scrolling, but the many tabs that are visible don't break any more.
Firefox has a lot of options for tab extensions if you wanted to explore for something more to your liking.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Tabs are placed in the sidebar, nested in collapsible trees, with a scrollbar. It's a major game changer.
Personally I save anything I actually want to refer back to as a PDF since the bookmarked web page will probably disappear.
My other bugbear with Chrome tabs is the inability to make all new tabs get added to the end of the list rather than after the active tab, in FF it's just a simple `about:config` option: `browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent=false`
That might be true for you, but on my 1920x1080 screen, Chromium appears to stop even trying to show any new tabs in the tab bar after around 125.
I have 453 tabs in this Firefox window.
With Firefox, thankfully, there's a way to enable such display style: https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Them...
The compact UI has back/forward buttons being the same size. The UI also takes up less space and is generally nicer IMO
I used to have this script built as an app bundle via Platypus, but that stopped working somewhere between Yosemite and Mojave (likely due to increasingly strict OS file permissions or something). The Automator app doesn't seem to suffer from this issue...I think I just had to grant it a couple permissions the first time I ran it.
I wasn't able to figure out how to set a custom icon from within Automator, but it's not too hard to do if you're comfortable mucking around inside app bundles. The icon file is stored under <app-bundle-root>/Contents/Resources/, and its name (sans extension) is referenced in <app-bundle-root>/Info.plist.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/ilikepi/9d2e17e0d3b3efd6fc0584f46f09...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
It seems that macOS authenticates each process, so that might provide some extra security.
There used to be a great addon called ClassicThemeRestorer that got killed during firefox's terrible web extension debacle. It lives on in https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx but different parts break everytime the fickle designers at mozilla change their mind on what a tab should look like.
In the specific example, it makes no sense for any single website to forgo, say, 5% of revenue to “teach browsers a lesson”, especially since any change would benefit them accrue mostly with their competitors.
See also: “Google/FB/... should leave the EU to protest these privacy laws...”
MacBook Pro 2017.
Edit: Having read your blog post, I want to say that I'm not necessarily asking for the original definition of DNT to be reused. What I want is for the DNT header to have the same effect as if I had said no to all optional categories of cookies.
The status quo is that we are asked a "yes or manage" question where "manage" means something horribly complicated that no one does. If we redefine DNT to mean "no to everything optional" then it becomes a matter of local law to define what is and isn't optional. This allows for the sort of minimum level of consumer protection that you're asking for.
The law could also require that this DNT header is opt-out. A per-site overridable DT header if you will.
I'm not going to claim that I have thought this through properly. It's just something that I wish Mozilla did some work on.
VA-API is not mentioned in the question at all. It is the most common api for video acceleration, but there are others - direct vdpau, or nvdec.
Seems very odd.
That said, it makes an ABP-compatible filter list available. This works with ublock origin:
The source code can be extracted from the extension file itself.
The issue is that websites want to annoy users until they finally maybe actually say yes to get the site to shut up.
Legally, tracking has to be off by default, tracking may not change the usability of the site, and tracking has to be purely optional, and the "no" has to be simpler, larger, and easier to use than the "yes".
The point of the GDPR, over the course of the next years, is to utterly destroy online advertising as a business model, and any and all tracking solutions with it.
As a personal confession I cannot sympathize for this animosity towards banners. Apps usually have a worse onboarding experience than websites.
My only considerations of GDPR notices is to note how many of them manage to be uncompliant and wonder if archiving services can bypass them.
When I visit a random wordpress blog I shouldn’t need any cookie from them — why would I?
When I visit an online shop it should be my choice if they remember me (which is precisely what the GDPR demands). This could be a little toggle switch labled “Remember me” that is off by default and that would be it.
But people seem to prefer forcing their cookies onto users.
"OneSignal Prompts are a 'soft request', meaning that they are not invoking the 'hard request' of the browser's Native Permission Prompt. This is important because if a user denies the native prompt, the developer is unable to prompt the user again, unless the user goes through a multi-step process to re-enable these permissions. On the other hand, if a user dismisses a Soft Prompt, the app or website can still present them the option later on."
Speaking for myself, showing such prompts repeatedly is a very good way to ensure that I'll never visit your website ever again. No, I don't care about your mobile app, anymore so than I did two days ago.
To provide some context on this, we provide clients with 4 built-in prompting options and we do our best to encourage them to use the one that is best for their user experience.
We definitely want to discourage people from asking for notification permission in an obtrusive way. It's not good for anyone when that happens. We wrote a blog post with some recommendations here: https://onesignal.com/blog/web-push-permission-prompting-cha...
> OneSignal encourages all websites to adopt a two-step prompting system if they don't already do so. This will help prevent the website from being penalized and forced to show a quieter permission prompt if too many users have denied the traditional native prompt in Chrome.
Websites are being penalized for a reason, and you know this. Simply adding another modal is just making the problem worse.
> The easiest prompt to transition to is OneSignal's Slide Prompt. Ideally, however, we encourage users to use the Custom Link prompt.
The Slide Prompt should not even be offered as a transition. It's completely at odds with the intent of this browser change, which is all about user intent. Providing facilities to present annoyances that bypass user interaction is the complete opposite of this.
> Offering a coupon in exchange for users opting-in to notifications.
…no?
Please, please, please reconsider how you are implementing these. If you are genuinely unaware of the widespread misuse of your tools, I'd be more than happy to direct you to numerous examples of zero-click, near-immediate, largely irrelevant faux notification requests coming from websites using your product.
Whilst there are the "every tab in o e window open forever" people, there are plenty of "window for task" people.
Personally, I have been a window for task person 'since forever' (tabs are context depth in said task, hence "close tabs to right" being one of the most useful features).
This will just not work anymore. I'll have to add some long winded FF specific explanation on what to do after clicking the button.
Anyway the FF UI is broken if user physically can't see any reaction from the browser after he requests notifications by clicking anywhere on the page.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/upcoming-notification-perm...
This is a frequent "mistake"/issue however, and we're working on a mitigation for it.
https://megous.com/dl/tmp/sub.txt
I guess this is then happening because I'm first checking if there's a subscription via `pushManager.getSubscription` before creating a new one in the event handler.
Yep, dropping getSubscription makes the popup appear again.
This does not seem like a reasonable complaint to me.
On Windows, the same is true of the encrypted data; any program that runs as you can decrypt it. Is it different on macOS? How does the system authenticate a specific program?
So it's not the program that is authenticated. The system simply makes sure that any program accessing that particularly sensitive data is really controlled by the logged in user.
This is entirely separate from protections for other files that may or may not be encrypted.
Really? I thought Chrome, same as Firefox, stored credentials in an SQL file, the reason behind it being profiles and its built-in sync service.
It is 2020 and totally possible to create websites without cookies or with only functionally needed cookies. You do your users a favour and your site will look better.
The very idea of the GDPR wasn’t to force websites to display cookie banners. It was to clarify that cookies can contain identifyable personal data and can be used for tracking, which is why we should avoid using them in that way or ask for consent if it really must be used.
There's no law anywhere that says you need to ask permission for storing cookies. You can perfectly well make a cookie-based login without a cookie banner. This bullshit about un-uncheckable "essential cookies" toggles has to go, you don't need permission for those, they don't need to be in the dialog. The GDPR even specifies this, albeit too vaguely: it should be as easy to accept tracking as it is to reject it, and in practice even a startup 100% focused on solving this problem gives that rule the middle finger.
Seriously, fuck this shit. The banner should say "We'd like to track your behavior so we can improve our service / sell better ads / whatever¹. [Ok] [Rather not]". It's not that hard. Only give Metomic your money if you think your visitors are idiots.
¹ (strike through what does not apply)
Of course, the gold standard is no tracking and no popup.
With a proper PiP mode, that's no longer an issue.
On the other hand, Firefox keeps the close button for tabs on the right, even in macOS where every close button is on the left.
Thankfully, I've found a bit of userChrome that corrects this, as a workaround.
I'm stuck on a Mac, where I cannot always on top, hide the title bar, or alt-drag windows to move them.
Not really. Resize your window to 1920x1080 and open 150 new tabs. In the last tab, open any site you want. Now switch back to the next to the last tab. Hover over the tab bar. That pop-up doesn't show you the last tab.
I'm not sure I follow. The popup shows you the tab you're hovering over. You wouldn't be hovering over the last tab because it's not in the visible area.
But that's unrelated to the problem they fixed. Right now, when you open a large amount of tabs, it always shows favicons. What it used to do, when tabs got smaller than about 30 pixels, was this: https://www.technorms.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/TooMany...
That was my point.
>But that's unrelated to the problem they fixed. Right now, when you open a large amount of tabs, it always shows favicons. What it used to do, when tabs got smaller than about 30 pixels, was this...
I mean, I guess it is better, but I wouldn't consider that "fixed".
Autofill doesn't require password entry, but before revealing any stored passwords you have to re-authenticate using the regular system login method.
I wish Firefox did the same.
But I noted that problem in my first post.
And you replied "Not really." to it.
I understood that to mean that all tabs would remain usable.
Being able to see a sliver of a favicon when I may have another 200 tabs that I can't get to isn't really fixed in my book.
> I can't use Chrome once my tabs shrink down to this: |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chrome tabs don't shrink down to a row of lines anymore.
The current behavior is still annoying but it fits a lot more tabs before breaking and it breaks much less severely.
