2014 me as a developer had Chrome as number 1 browser for both development and all rest. Firefox once a month just to check cross browser compatibility. And Safari was just installed without me using it.
2019 me uses Safari for everything except development. Excellent power consumption and UX. Firefox for development. And lastly Chrome for all web apps that only work on Chrome. ( Google Meet etc. ) I feel much much better that I am not dependent on chrome.
The one thing I cannot stand is that fucking URL/search bar (I detest these things in general, but Safari has the worst implementation). Most implementations (e.g. Firefox and Chrome) will encode the space and go on their way, meanwhile Safari translates a space into a search unconditionally — because clearly I want my wikipedia viewing history to end up in my search history FFS. I'm also not a fan of view source opening in a dev tools frame versus a new tab/window like Chrome and Firefox.
Speaking of the dev tools, I was just poking around and saw this in the console:
[Info] Successfuly preconnected to https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/
[Info] Successfuly preconnected to https://aax.amazon-adsystem.com/
Interesting as I'm running uBlock Origin (which is, admittedly, more neutered on Safari). I know I've disabled that prefetching before, but I no longer see any options to turn it off. Speaking of UBO, Safari loves to claim UBO will increase energy consumption and slow down my browsing (HA). I wonder if the "disable plugins to save energy" option means that Safari will kill uBlock whenever it feels like. :/
Also, if you have touchID then you can use it on safari to autofill login credentials. I just wish safari had an active plugin ecosystem like firefox (or chrome) does.
So yes Google, Chrome will always likely be running on my system, but in almost exactly the same place IE did 10-15 years ago. Is that something to be proud of?
I don't regret having stayed with Firefox through the years when Chrome was all the rage. IE6 was the most popular browser in the world when I first tried Firefox, so I know how it feels. Other browsers come and go, but Firefox keeps burning bright.
I do look forward to the chrome devtools release videos, always learn something new.
Otherwise, Firefox has the better API for add-ons and a more 'open' approach in general, so there are a lot more things you can't do on Chrome that you can in Firefox than vice versa. I have yet to see a decent tree tabs extension for Chrome, for example. (They exist, but none compare to the one available for Firefox).
I use firefox for dev and browsing but my job requires me to check out chrome more because it's used the most. One thing I find myself using firefox for is the feature of visualising a flexbox which chrome doesn't have.
Safari needs a duplicate tab button though.
It also integrates very well with my other Apple devices, and works with AppleScripts and keyboard maestro to quickly do complex macros and talk to other apps.
Sure, we're still testing, if stuff works on IE10...
IE11 isn't much better, though...
I use Firefox for all my browsing needs except for Google apps, for which I keep an install of Vivaldi around. I only really fire up Chrome if some stupid internal workplace app refuses to work on anything else. It truly is the new IE.
At least let me try and if it fails I’ll file an issue with FF so they can fix it and improve instead of locking me out with half-truths.
Otherwise I discovered nextdns.io recently, which seems to work well too.
One of my favorite apps on macOS.
https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl...
The old version is so much more usable that I find myself using that computer much more frequently. It is rock solid with 100's of tabs open, all my extensions work and without silly restrictions on what they can and can not do and it uses a lot less memory. It's measurably faster too. I'm all for progress and improvements in software but after a long stretch of being a very ardent FF supporter I really do wonder if they have a future. If a competitor had a dream about what they could do to ruin Firefox they could not have done a better job.
Enhanced tracking protection is great but it doesn't matter if you push away your users.
It is rock solid with 100's of tabs open
I want to be very, very clear: there is nothing "wrong" with having 100s of tabs open, and it certainly would be good if all browsers worked just as well with 500 tabs as a single tab. I'm on your side!
But, in general, people making sweeping statements about software in public have what I feel is a responsibility to be clear when they're using it in ways that are off the beaten path.
Like if I complained about "Windows being buggy", and it turned out I was using a copy of Windows 95 as a substitute for a proper realtime operating system for my spaceship's navigation computer, that's something I really ought to mention upfront.
(Not that having large numbers of tabs is that outlandish, or outlandish at all)
I've also got a Firefox 52 installation lying around and the new version is noticably faster.
goto about:config and search for gfx.webrender.enabled and make sure it's set to false.
EDIT: More info on the rollout https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/20/firefox-webrender-rollout-...
This is one reason why the software industry as a whole sucks, we just do not give a damn about the users.
While I agree with you that the whole addon migration was a disaster and the wounds are healing just very slowly, I don't have the impression that recent Firefox versions had any performance issues (at least on my machines).
Meaning: I basically have a mindset which as a programmer would say: "shall I spend effort trying to optimize my app for users that have 200 tabs open? Naaaa, I don't see a usecase for that to happen."
They should be focused on giving a better smooth UI, make it faster, remove unwanted extensions like pocket, make all the sites work.
Let's see how valid this comment is in couple of years.
Firefox is not as popular as Chrome thanks to the intense Google advertising some time ago. Even nowadays Google still advertises "this sites runs best on Chrome", kinda like Coca Cola still advertises its products even if they are already the leaders in the segment.
You can just put a banner saying this website works well on chrome.
FF should be more active in making all the sites work on their browser.
That aside, as commenters everywhere will tell you, Mozilla has made huge performance improvements in Firefox over the last few years and continues to do so. It's not like Mozilla has decided to stop doing everything except privacy.
It's like a privacy friendly social network can't beat Facebook.
Unless Google does something extremely stupid people are going to stick to it.
People use Gmail, YouTube, Docs,Google search, Android and all of them are in sync with chrome. It goes hand in hand with your life.
Same is for Apple, they make iPhone they have mail they have macos. Everything sync with safari. Makes life easy.
What does Firefox offer? Only a browser. And privacy is not going make people switch to them.
Those are all things which do not differentiate Firefox from Chrome. They're focusing on that as well, but Chrome will never be able to copy their privacy-enhancing features, because that's Google's business model.
So I think we’ve reached a phase where performance is good enough on any hardware for people to start worrying about the big picture problems like privacy and tracking as well. Not to the exclusion of performance - but it’s clearly become more important to random non-tech folks.
The majority of regular users don't know the extent to which they are being tracked, because they don't have a good grasp of the technology or a good idea of what's possible.
Privacy is vegetables -- I know I should eat more, but I'm not going to go out of my way for it.
Now, everywhere offers a vegetarian option, it's normal. What it took was dedication by fanatics* and to increase mindshare amongst the young. I'd venture that the same conditions would reap the same rewards with privacy.
* that's a wee joke… or is it? :-)
While I realize that's kind of the point, in my mind there is somewhat of a difference between "the site I'm on is tracking me to figure out how I use their site" vs. "any site I visit is essentially aggregated data because all the sites use the same major trackers and ad networks". I wonder if the big analytics companies will need to change their business model, or at least their tech, to account for these kinds of changes.
These changes make it harder for analytics companies to track users across domains, but still allows site owners to analyze their own traffic.
I think from a pure interested user perspective the bottom line is I don't care what happens to anything as long as I'm not tracked/measured etc. Find another way or just get lucky with the correct mixture of creativity and hiring. My web browsing does not exist for companies to exist.
The list [1], which includes many APIs, also breaks hundreds of websites [2] that access those APIs
[1] https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti...
My only gripe is they still aren't blocking ALL ads, but regardless it's a way better user experience now than it ever was.
Firefox 67 feels like a whole new beast compared to their older versions.
If you haven't tried FF for a while I recommend doing so and I suggest trying it across multiple devices. The tab management, syncing, pinning and sending etc. across multiple devices is awesome.
I also recommend Privacy Badger. It’s a neat extension that automatically detects trackers by auto-learning. This means that Privacy Badger will catch trackers that aren’t caught by static lists, like what Firefox and uBlock Origin are doing.
Btw, both these extensions I mentioned are now deprecated in Chrome due to Manifest V3 and something tells me they’ll always be at home in Firefox ;-)
i trust ublock origin because gorhill is very public, passionate, and transparent. i trust privacy badger because it's backed by the EFF's reputation. those are two very high bars to set and they are literally the only two extensions i trust enough to install on my machine.
I'll keep using Safari, which also gives me that wonderful cross-device syncing.
This Wil have three consequences: Many websites will partially break? Which ones? webmaster will lack many data necessary to understand what users do on their platform, where they missclick, what they don't use etc, thus diminishing the ability of webmasters to make great products. *the most dramatic one: People will see ads but the owner of a website will no longer earn ad money, because those are the third party scripts that allowed to prove to the ad platform that a user had effectively seen X ads.
"great products". Yeah, websites used to be much, much better before loading every bit of text with a remote javascript.
Here's a behavioral data point: Go back to making good websites and stop leaking private data everywhere. That's a great product.
This update is only about a select list of "bad" domains, though. I don't think most users would want to block literally all third party scripts (Source: I use uMatrix set to do that, and every other site I visit requires a complicated ritual of unblocking layers of scripts, frames, and XHR. Don't even get me started on static sites that display blank without scripts from a dozen CDNs. At least it's a good opportunity to rethink if I really want to go there)
> According to the original screenshot in the thread, your web page is sending an HTTP request to https://www.reddit.com/api/v1/access_token. If the user has previously visited reddit.com, this request will include the user's reddit cookies normally. Also, the HTTP request I mentioned before has a Referer header that points to the address of your web page by default in most browsers. So Reddit will be able to tell which user has visited which page on your site. In other word, Reddit will be able to see the user's browsing history, as if they had access to the user's computer.
> Note that nobody is blaming you or your site here.
[1] https://revddit.com/user/rhaksw
[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.privacy/XO84Ezrw...
You can get an idea of which sites are blocked by reviewing the list of blocked domains [1] (this includes many APIs, such as reddit.com) and a 5 year old issue where people post websites broken by tracking protection [2].
[1] https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti...
You're going to have to live with it. Get some beta testers onboard maybe.
99% of the data anyone is collecting which you call "stalking" is either available in server logs or could be easily modified so that it was. I guess you might just have to stop using the internet.
Even with these changes, there are still lots of ways for Google to track you and monetize ads.
I will be excited for the day when Privacy Badger is an unnecessary extension.
Disconnect may or may not use M-L classifiers in their selection process, I don’t know.
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger/faq#How-does-Privacy-Badge...
In short, I'm looking for a list of instructions: go to Options > Privacy and Security > Content Blocking > make sure cookies is set to at least "All third party cookies...".
> For existing users, we’ll be rolling out Enhanced Tracking Protection by default in the coming months without you having to change a thing. If you can’t wait, you can turn this feature on by clicking on the menu icon marked by three horizontal lines at the top right of your browser, then under Content Blocking. Go to your privacy preferences and click on the Custom gear on the right side. Mark the Cookies checkbox and make sure that “Third-party trackers” is selected. To learn more about our privacy and security settings and get more detail on what each section – Standard, Strict, and Custom – includes, visit here [1].
(It is not “Block all third-party cookies”, make sure to select the correct one.)
How is this relevant? Did Dave Camp's SVP appointment trigger these changes? Honest question, because this is the first sentence of the article and I'm having a hard time understanding why.
Tracking protection is great though. I hope Firefox gains market share again, I love the direction it's taking.
Maybe it’s the same thing?
Except of course, syncing container rule settings across Firefox sync devices.
So, stable should be perfectly fine for day to day use if you feel less adventurous. It's basically the release intended for world+dog. The only people actually using ESR probably are enterprises that for whatever reason actually care about which version of Firefox they are using and third party software integrators that just don't want to deal with major changes every minor release. Tor browser is a good example.
I'll click the update button after clicking reply. It seems I missed a few updates. Zero issues that I noticed with this one: 68.0b4.
Though that also means finding a good source for them as I currently just use the packages from Debian Stable (well, upcoming stable as I upgraded to Buster early).
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
I was able to achieve way better performance by changing this to `true` in `about:config`:
gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque
gfx.webrender.all
gfx.webrender.enabled
If you set these options, and then later on, you find that your Firefox is super buggy and won't render anything properly and has weird crashes, it could be because you set these options — and it might take hours or days to realize that.
(And then reverse them, somehow, assuming that gfx.webrender.all hasn't broken about:config!)
Despite other issues, which there are some, I'm really happy to see FF not only enable more ways for users to protect themselves - but to be rolling it out as a default.
A lot of non-technical users I've encountered usually want the extra (usually non-default) protections, but don't know where to begin (or what is even available) so they continue with the default installation. FF setting some of the more mature privacy protection features as a default moving forward is a great sign of commitment to the cause of bringing privacy to everyone. Even those who don't know how to poke around the settings or about:config.
>Today, we’re releasing the latest update for Facebook Container which prevents Facebook from tracking you on other sites that have embedded Facebook capabilities such as the Share and Like buttons on their site.
This is a much needed change that I'm also really happy to see. Not really containing anything if the embeds still function.
Tldr: I fully support security by default.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Chrome makes it easy to switch profiles/accounts with the account button in the top right, but Firefox profile management is clunky. You have to choose on startup and can’t launch a window with a different profile from the browser itself.
Next time I tried, I found Multi-containers! It’s EXACTLY what I was trying to do with Chrome Profiles (isolate cookies per persona) and it improves on Chrome in a couple ways:
- lighter than Chrome profiles, very fast to create new containers
- Not tied to a google account
- multiple containers in the same window
- Domain-specific rules make sure you don’t cross-contaminate containers accidentally
- Profile stuff like History and bookmarks is shared across containers and securely synced with client side encryption by default.
You can also get a REAL win for privacy by adding the Temporary Containers extension [0]. This lets you create arbitrarily many containers. It defaults to being an option (right click -> open in temp container) but can be set much more aggressively. I have it create a new temporary container every time I move to a new domain. Amazing.
That DOES require some manual configuration to avoid breaking complex products like Office365. I created a huge regex that identifies Office365 domains and triggers a whitelist with less aggressive isolation. Still, not too much more work than running uBlock Origin with 3rd party resources disabled by default.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
That's actually why I prefer the full profile option in Firefox (i.e. running 'firefox -p' and selecting a profile). I don't want shared history across profiles.
https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
The last descriptive update was 4 years ago,
> As the list is increasingly managed according to policy, breakage is a feature, not a bug.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1101005
Among the broken websites is one I just completed, revddit, "removeddit for user pages":
https://www.reddit.com/user/revddit/
Creating a bot to spam your own website is obviously against the site rules. I see most of your posts on Hacker News are similarly promotional.
The bot itself only responds once per user or thread, and I've already blacklisted some subreddits per suggestions [1]. Feel free to pm me at u/rhaksw if you would like to discuss it further.
The same sort of thing undermined do-not-track headers. The instant they passed from being user-enabled to on-by-default, advertisers were presented with a strong excuse to ignore them.
It was worse for do-not-track, as all the major browsers enabled it by default, making it not at all a signal of user preference.
I want someone to be as dedicated to the product as id was to doom. I want to be able to use their browser for free for a year or three. If I still like you then I'll mary you. Then I'll pay a yearly fee for as long as I live.
Edit: until you start to act a fool. If you do then you're out. Can someone please create this product?
2 weeks ago mozilla deactivated by super-incompetent accident all of their security add ons and required a completely opaque 'studies' tool to push an update.
With the security features deactivated tons of people who need to get work done or didn't understand what was going on used the web with all of the tracking features turned on, no doubt allowing tons of previously anonymous stored data on users to be de-anonymized. They don't have to be able to track everyone all of the time, you just have to really get a unique identifier on the browser tracks left in the databases. Many FF installs in linux distributions ceased to function at all.
These simple observations went hardly remarked on HN.
BoingBoing.net which has previously covered security issues well, somehow did not notice/report this event, which stands out in recent memory as one of the worst privacy catastrophes. An inquiry to Mr. Doctorow himself in regards to this, as well as why there is still a tracking F on the page in 2019, has gone unanswered.
Now, a month later, without any further discussion of this event, Firefox wants us to trust it to single-handedly defeat tracking with a single new catch-all feature.
On HN, top rated comments, rather than expressing skepticism and asking for details, are about a completely different browser, Safari.
Perhaps the best comment after the firefix addon-aggedon noted, FF does not have to have a studies feature, it does not have to push automatic updates, it does not have to have a single signing certificate for all of the add-ons which creates a single point of failure. This line of inquiry is devastating to the true nature of mozilla and the loyalties of the individuals behind this code.
I am posting this as a response to the lowest rated, yet in my opinion best comment in this topic, hoping that other people who notice the complete distractions and consensus cracking going on all over the place above the fold, will know where to look for someone saying something intelligent about the situation.
And so this: the problem is not the computers and the software, it is the nature of these institutions and the people in them. Semi-corporate half-charitable, expansive things like whatever Mozilla is lend themselves easily to the same sort of infiltration and takeover as normal, evil, corporations. Do you not think the fbi, cia, air force and mossad have been spending years getting their agents into the 'key positions' at mozilla? Does mozilla(or canonical) seem to you like an organization who could resist this sort of effort?
It is now obvious that Firefox is run by the enemies of open culture, and having only the choice between FF and Chrome, developed by an even less trustworthy institution, the internet as dreamed of by people who care about freedom and liberty of the individual is in serious trouble.
So the comment to which I am replying is the best, what shape of institution will create software to make the internet open and fair, and facilitate free speech without infiltration and subversion by spies and paid propagandists?
Why can all of the kings horses and all the kings men not create a functional browser that doesn't publicize reading habits and de-anonymize with extremely obfuscated input analysis, if not outright keylogging and password theft and intentional malware backdoors?
The browser has replaced the television for most people, if you haven't noticed, so this is important and how discusion platforms like hackernews deal with the discussion of this, reveals all we need to know about the institution and individuals behind hackernews.
Something is rotten here and it could not be more obvious to anyone still capable of independent thought.
Getting more people on Firefox would do the tech world so much good, diversifying who controls what in the web.
Hopefully Mozilla will have funding and manpower to improve this.
Thanks for the work nonetheless.