- 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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
The compact UI has back/forward buttons being the same size. The UI also takes up less space and is generally nicer IMO
* 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[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
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.