I find that DNS-based ad blocking works surprisingly well, and there are lots of ways to get that (depending on your OS). I guess not many people use it, or the evil people would be working harder to get around it.
Ublock style adblocking where the whole ad element is removed rather just blocking the request that the ad element makes a lot of difference. I guess it depends on your prespective. But the former to me feels almost utopian.
Custom rules and the element picker is another great differentiator. The ability to easily get rid of stuff that you find annoying but the blocklist maintainers don’t consider relevant is great.
I have my own custom DoH server that does adblocking, and it gets rid of nearly every ad I’ve ever seen on iOS Safari (except YouTube, but I have Rehike to handle YouTube requests).
I never browser the web on mobile, it’s such a horrid experience and not because of ads. Maybe some day it’ll change but tbh I use my phone for Youtube/ Music and phone calls and the camera and that’s it. It’s just god awful at browsing ime.
Firefox Mobile is pretty good. It’s a shame they’ve stopped supporting the platform it was born in (Linux Maemo-Meego-Mer, now succeeded by SailfishOS). Niche mobile OSes need a modern browser to be a viable alternative. My N9 was usable way past its expiration date because it had a relatively fresh Firefox.
It’s also a shame they dropped their classic architecture and their customization ethos. I understand there were security issues, but they should have tried not to throw the baby with the bathwater. Vimperator was the very best browsing experience I have had on any platform, and it’s gone. Vim in the browser with nearly zero glitches, fast and no ads.
It’s also a shame they dropped their classic architecture and their customization ethos. I understand there were security issues, but they should have tried not to throw the baby with the bathwater. Vimperator was the very best browsing experience I have had on any platform, and it’s gone. Vim in the browser with nearly zero glitches, fast and no ads.
From what I remember, it wasn’t security issues. It’s that they tried several times with things like the Jetpack API before admitting to themselves that turning every bit of the browser internals into a de facto API surface was hogtying their ability to re-architect to catch up with Chrome’s multi-process architecture.
Reminds me of what a PITA it is to get all the edge-cases right when extending Vim when everything is monkey-patching keybindings willy-nilly as if they’re DOS TSRs or Mac OS INITs instead of using a proper plugin API.
That’s true, but security also played a role. There’s a post in Tridactyl’s mailing / issues list (can’t find it now) explaining how Mozilla is reluctant to give plugins the ability to change too much of the UI. Therefore, there new APIs do not offer that possibility. There were talks about creating APIs for privileged plugins, but it never panned out. A shame.
I’ve been using cromite for a relatively long time. It had a relatively good adblock and a dark reader — which are the replacements for the only two extensions I have in Firefox on mobile. Since Firefox had added process isolation for tabs I’m back to using it though
My favourite feature of Firefox mobile is being able to put the URL bar on the bottom of the screen. I wish I could buy a phone with good specs and a screen about the size of the original iPhone so I could actually reach the top bar without contorting my hand too much, but since I can’t I’ll happily take the bottom bar instead.
The only deal breaker for me is that it’s missing keyboard controls, so if I decide to pack light on a trip and want to do some programming on the go with my tablet and a BT keyboard, I have to either use Chrome for browsing the internet or get a very annoying experience on Firefox.
The only deal breaker for me is that it’s missing keyboard controls
It’d sad how much Android keyboard handling has regressed. In the early days we had configurable keyboard shortcuts and a consistent menus that were accessible using hardware buttons or the keyboard. Apps usually had good keyboard support too. Nowadays we get to play “hunt the hamburger” or “guess what to tap” instead.
Don’t all mobile browsers do that nowadays? Safari has had this feature since iOS 14 or 15 I think, 3 or 4 years ago, and it was already late to the game.
Directly from Apple is actually reasonably priced. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have any refurb 13 minis in stock. I’m ride or die with the 12 mini until there’s a worthy challenger for a mini phone.
I’m ride or die with the 12 mini until there’s a worthy challenger for a mini phone.
I’m afraid I’m waiting for that kind of challenger, too. I love my 2022 SE, but apps and sites are not adequately testing on that screen size anymore. Navigation apps have gotten especially frustrating. I’m hoping against hope that the next mini maintains TouchID, because I really don’t like FaceID on my phone, but all signs point to “no” on that front.
I’d halfway be happier to get a less expensive flip phone that I could tether a tablet to, and carry both things, but I don’t see any evidence of one of those either.
Not refurb, but I’ve been buying all iPhones both for myself and family members used from swappa.com for years. It’s worked great for me, zero issues and you save a lot of money.
The equivalent for Europe is swappie.com. They make it very easy to trade-in your old phone give you a proper chargeback. I think started operating from Finland but now have warehouses in different countries. e.g. Germany, which makes shipping pretty fast.
Chrome’s browser history and address bar behavior are unusable for me. Chrome deletes browsing history after 90 days. Browsing history is a big part of my workflow because I remember a lot of URLs partially, so all I have to do to bring the page up in Firefox is type a fragment of them. To support this, I’ve configured Firefox to store browsing history indefinitely (very cool that you can configure this).
I had to look this up, because my first assumption was that this had to be an unintentional user misconfiguration, because a default of deleting history after 90 days would be incredibly annoying. I’m pretty shocked to find that it’s entirely correct, and that there doesn’t appear to be any way to configure it or even any warning to users.
On Firefox I use the history as an alternate search, and I’ve definitely often had successful results that were older than a year. I hate the idea that my browser might silently drop useful data, or not warn me that it’d do that.
I guess maybe people’s expecations have changed and they now see history as a liability rather than a tool? Though if so, I’d entirely blame that on Google and it’s friends.
On desktop I agree that it is great. But on mobile the search from the URL bar is atrocious. It seems inconsistent and often get some results quickly than the good ones later, or for some reason just can’t get it to show the URL I want.
I love Firefox and open source. But the little chips in the armor and gravity of the chrome ecosystem for my day job was too much.
I dropped Firefox for a weird bug in Google hangouts/meet/video where my audio when using an analog to USB converter would make me sound like a robot. No clue if it’s their fault or Google’s or the makers of the Motu 2 I’m using. I tried making some videos to report it be it was really hard as it needed a 2-3 devices and a video session and the devices couldn’t be in the same room since I needed to demo audio to reproduce the problem.
I wish I could “trade” some open source time where I’m equipped to take on Ruby or Rust contributions, for a foreign ecosystem where someone else is more equipped. I’ve wondered if I’m alone in that want or if there could be some sort of bartering marketplace for work hours on open projects rather than for money.
I ended up just using the Google Meet PWA with Chrome (in its own segregated window, as if it were a regular application), and Firefox for everything else
I dropped Firefox for a weird bug in Google hangouts/meet/video where my audio when using an analog to USB converter would make me sound like a robot.
This very much sounds like a sample rate mismatch between your Audio Interface and OS, e.g. the MOTU M2 runs at 48kHz, while the OS expects a sample rate of 44.1kHz for the device. It’s a bit odd that this is limited to Firefox.
I have the same situation, but my solution is to use Chrome for Google Workspace pages exclusively, and Firefox (esp. w/ Containers) for everything else, on both work and personal devices. Aside from some YouTube hiccups that crop up about once a year, Firefox works just as well for everything that isn’t Google Workspaces.
For me, Firefox Containers feel like the “right” way to do what Chrome instead (I assume?) expects you to do via multiple signed in Accounts in the browser itself.
Perhaps one day in the future we will all live in a post-scarcity utopia where effectively-unlimited compute power and bandwidth are free of charge to all.
Today, we do not live in that world. Today, compute power and bandwidth cost money. So, either you have an internet where every person’s presence must be paid for by that person out of their own pocket and those who can’t afford that are barred from it, or you have an internet where some people can have a presence without paying. Thus far the only we we’ve figured out of actually pulling off the latter at sufficient scale to let the world participate is via advertising; there are not enough donors with deep enough pockets to do it via charity.
Thus far the only we we’ve figured out of actually pulling off the latter at sufficient scale to let the world participate is via advertising; there are not enough donors with deep enough pockets to do it via charity.
Are you sure that’s the only way? Can you genuinely think of no routes to an alternative?
Fediverse is for hobbyists, it does not address the monetization issue.
From the perspective of the content provider / publisher: a publishing / tooling web business (even if small) has as possible income sources mainly the options provided above (paid accounts and ads). Nobody figured out another better way to build a business on the web yet, which I think is @ubernostrum’s point.
Even just a non-business personal web presence is a problem. Either you pay for your web presence or someone else pays for it, and the only successful way we’ve found to do “someone else pays for it” is to have the someone else be an advertiser who gets ads on the page in exchange for their money. And even then it hasn’t always been enough – Geocities, which so many people nostalgically yearn for, had ads and still struggled financially.
Remains to be seen if it can actually hold up. The cost in both money and time to run instances is non-trivial, and it’s a cliché to point out instances whose admins burn out/flame out.
Also, yeah, I will complain about the “sufficient scale”. Big, huge, gigantic instances tend to range from ten thousand or so up to perhaps a couple hundred thousand active accounts. Even if you have a bunch of instances in that size group, you’re looking at roughly the population of a good-sized city. We live in a world of billions of people.
Obviously a larger Fediverse user base would come with a larger donor base. What makes you so sure the increased revenue would not keep up with with the increased costs?
I would still be curious to understand what you meant in your reply to the linked comment, but perhaps you changed your position. You haven’t completely abandoned it though so there should still be plenty to discuss!
The demand to “indicate your preference” rings hollow when the Internet is already both things, as @aspensmonster pointed out. There is no realistic proposal to avoid either one; it will always be a spectrum.
I would like to ask once again if you really think the web would be poorer if websites were less like Facebook and Twitter and more like Wikipedia and Lobsters?
My home internet connection is right now $83 / month. (It used to be $15 :( but the cable company keeps jacking it up… even though it delivers very little more practical benefit to me than it used to…)
That internet connection would be absolutely worthless if there was nobody on the other side to connect to. Maybe some fraction of that $83 / month could go to the people who make the internet valuable as well as the people who make the internet possible? I’m not saying the cable company is worthless, just that maybe we could find some way to spread the money without advertising middle men. (The money to pay for ads also ultimately comes from the users who buy the products…)
Does this make poor people second class or forbidden? Well, if I didn’t pay my cable bill, they wouldn’t let me connect anymore sooooooooo already reality? And a lot of the best on line content is behind additional paywalls now too - even with the advertising. So eh, maybe this isn’t an ideal situation but it at least doesn’t seem much worse than it is now.
I won’t fall for the false dichotomy. The web was not as hostile in the 90s and 00s. Yes, there were flashing ad banners in places, but it was, overall, much less invasive (spying/tracking).
Communities grew out of passions and common interests. Not every single fucking thing needed to be a profitable endeavor. (Look at Reddit in the early days)
I feel like we’ve become more and more like the Ferengi species from Star Trek.
The Ferengi were always a metaphor for western capitalist societies in general, and the US in particular. Check out the Lower Decks episode where Boimler gets trapped in an hotel on Ferenginar for a weekend because he has no resistance to the addictive nature of Ferengi daytime TV.
No, it is not. The amount of long standing bugs firefox has is astounding. It is very annoying to develop apps for firefox. But the main reason web devs prefer chrome is dev utils.
The main reason why I switch to Chrome in some situations is that it has a force-focused mode (that’s not the name, but I can never remember the real name) where if you focus an element, then click in the devtools, blur events won’t fire, so you can use devtools to investigate certain popups or elements in particular states that are difficult to explore normally. This is missing in Firefox, and it’s really the only thing that makes me switch to Chrome in a debugging session (outside of generally making sure that my code works in different browsers).
On top of that, in my experience Chrome has slightly better tooling for viewing details about the positions or styles of particular elements, and it has lighthouse built-in. But I’m always sceptical of overly focusing on lighthouse metrics, and the element viewer in Chrome isn’t so much better than Firefox in practice. So most of the time, I don’t feel like I’m missing much.
On the other hand, I don’t think Chrome has a proper flamegraph performance analysis tool, and that’s probably my most-used way of debugging performance issues in the browser. In Chrome you can see how long each function in the stack has taken (which in fairness, is also a useful view to have), but in Firefox you can use the flamegraph view to see which function is running most often as a proportion of the entire time the program has spent running. You can kind of get the same information out of Chrome, but only via a different view, and I find it harder to get a good overview of exactly what’s been going on. It’s also much harder to teach if you’re trying to show someone else how to spot performance issues.
In the end I stick with Firefox, because there’s not a big difference between the two, but there are definitely features in both browsers that would be great to see in the other.
you can use devtools to investigate certain popups or elements in particular states that are difficult to explore normally. This is missing in Firefox
You can right-click an element in the Firefox devtools inspector and there’s a “Change Psuedo-class” menu that lets you force focus/hover/target states, fwiw.
That’s a slightly different case than the one I’m interested, although it’s also useful.
The case I’m interested is having an element that will disappear if it loses focus or if the mouse clicks somewhere else. For example, a popup window that hides itself if the user clicks somewhere else on the screen, or a text field that appears while the user is editing something, and then disappears if they cancel, escape, or focus away from the field. Debugging that element can be quite difficult in Firefox because clicking into the devtools counts as focusing away, which hides the element I’m trying to look at. Importantly, this effect is usually done with Javascript, and so the CSS pseudo-classes don’t necessarily apply.
In Chrome, this is called emulate a focused page and it works really well for these sorts of use-cases.
Chrome has a few extra really useful tools in its DevTools panel. Yesterday I used the Layers tool to debug a weird stacking bug I had on my website. Chrome’s DevTools also have proper support for debugging WebSockets connections—in the Network tab, you can click on any WebSockets request and it’ll show you the incoming/outgoing messages streaming in over time. The network throttling in Chrome also seems a lot more effective than Firefox’s implementation (since it actually throttles bandwidth at a very low level, which causes WebSockets to stall—not something Firefox can do.)
There are also differences between error and warning messages in the two browsers. Sometimes the errors in Chrome can be less cryptic, sometimes the ones in Firefox are better—it’s a bit hit or miss depending on what API you use.
Myself I primarily use Firefox for development, simply because it’s my main browser and has most of the tools I need. I only use Chrome for the aforementioned tools Firefox seems to be missing.
And personal opinion: I find Firefox’s DevTools panel a lot more intuitive and less cluttered from a UX perspective. That might be just me being more used to it than Chrome’s though.
Huh! I’m pretty sure I was clicking through all the menus trying to find it… Well, no matter. It’s good that it’s there, won’t need to pull out Chrome next time ^^
I’ve been on and off web dev a few times over the last ~15 years and chrome dev tools have always seemed worse. They’re close, but often missing (for example, im working on some content in an… annoyingly restrictive environment right now and the FF style editor has been super useful, chrome doesn’t have that)
As far as bugs in foundational APIs and layout, ive found a couple issues in both but as long as you aren’t working with technologies that came out last week, they mostly just work, dev experience wise.
The other day I was trying to troubleshoot something network-related in Chrome, and the network dev tools felt clunky to me. It seemed like I could never find the right button to get this or that info, but I wrote off the issue as me being more familiar with Firefox’s network UI, as opposed to Chrome’s UI being worse. (Though both could be true!)
I don’t think it’s you holding it wrong. Chrome’s network inspector has been much worse than Firefox’s for years. The biggest single bug I’ve seen with it is that Chrome’s network inspector used to give very incorrect output on CORS failures until quite recently. It had bugs that appeared to stem from how it was eliding the CORS preflight requests.
Every open-source project that lasts long enough and becomes popular enough will have “astounding” numbers of “long standing bugs” open on its tracker.
I assume the parent post is dry sarcasm. I understand the metrics mindset that makes product owners auto-close bugs, but I can’t imagine any user thinking it’s a good strategy.
Not sure if you mean web apps or extensions, but building extensions for both chrome and FF is a lot worse than web apps. Their APIs are close enough that it’s doable, but most things have subtle or unsubtle differences that require lots of special casing each target.
Although it’s unpopular, manifest v3 APIs have made this situation a lot better.
For me the dev utils are major part of preferring Firefox. I hate it when I open a coworkers network tab, click on a request and find that the essential information to troubleshoot is simply missing.
Then back to my computer and hoping I can reproduce the issue.
I’ve got 4 privacy and security enhanced browsers on my mobile. Vanadium and Chromite are based on Chrome, Fennec and Mull are based on Firefox. All have ad blocking. If you want ad blocking in a Chrome based mobile browser, that’s available, you just can’t get it directly from Google is all.
Fennec and Mull have the same extensions as Firefox Mobile, and they have about:config. These apps are versions of Firefox Mobile, modified to prioritize the needs of power users over the needs of corporations, so of course they are fully configurable.
Instead of 🙏🏿ing the Mozilla corporation, just install Fennec! (Or Mull if you want extra privacy hardening beyond what Fennec does.)
I install most of my mobile browsers from the F-Droid app store (not Vanadium). I recommend F-Droid because all of the apps are vetted to ensure that they meet the F-Droid standards of prioritizing the needs of users over the needs of corporations. All the apps are free/open source, there’s generally no telemetry, in app advertising, or other “anti-features”. Some anti-features are allowed but you see a warning before you download. In the case of Fennec, F-Droid warns me that although telemetry is removed, Fennec may still connect to Mozilla services that can track users (eg, the extensions store).
I just wish Firefox’s performance on Windows resembled anything like Chrome’s. It’s a complete memory hog, if you have even a few tabs open it easily chugs down gigabytes of memory, and it doesn’t seem to have a tab suspension feature that actually works. I’m not really sure what the deal here is, but I finally had to switch away because I just couldn’t handle it locking up my system (even with 16 GB of RAM!). Some of this is surely Windows’ fault, but Chrome doesn’t do this.
Had a similar issue with Firefox on Alpine (Edge). My problem was CPU related - spiking upwards to 95% every 10-15 minutes with regular web browsing. Chromium barely hits ~10% doing the same activities…
Seems accurate, I just looked at about:processes on mobile Nightly and it showed several “shared web process”. Unfortunate, but I’ll keep using it for now.
This is not relevant to most users but the fact that I can build Firefox on my computer in a sane amount of time was such a relief when I switched back last year. Chromium takes literally 10x as long to build.
A weird overview of things that I don’t really need and the Extensions are more of a liability than anything else.
I’ve been on a bit of a neo-browser trip recently trying out:
Arc (discontinued it seems)
Vivaldi (extremely hokey undesigned Windows bullshit, but it’s growing on me)
Zen (a Firefox derivative browser with extensions, mods, and themes and all that jazz)
Zen Twilight (development version of Zen that is looking quite like Arc now)
Extensions expand the surface of your browser in every possible bad way. No guarantees that anything in an extension will keep working so better not base anything critical on it.
At least on Android it doesn’t, unless there’s some config I’m missing? I just tried that today, it’s incredibly annoying having to switch to another app.
Edit: Looks like it’s just now rolling out, though I enabled chrome://flags/#android-open-pdf-inline and it still doesn’t seem to be working, maybe it’s a different flag.
Edit2: yeah I’d need 132 (current beta) and another flag to run it on Android 14:
The “Open PDF Inline on Android” flag lets Chrome open PDF files natively on Android 15, whereas the “Open PDF Inline on Android pre-V” flag lets Chrome open them on devices running Android 12 or later. The former flag is available on all versions of Chrome right now, but the latter flag is only available in Chrome 132 or later, which is currently in Beta.
Oh wow thanks for that link. This is honestly a massive quality of life improvement, no idea how it took them this long to finally port over such basic functionality.
It’s about 2 years since it was enabled in Firefox (I’d mentioned it at the time here). Though this is a somewhat different thing in Chrome, it uses the system PDF renderer, while Firefox uses pdf.js same as on the desktop.
The elephant in the room is performance. Firefox, for whatever reason, is significantly worse than Chrome in weird pathological conditions that always occur given the uptime/usage of a primary browser. It’s really the only remaining problem, but it’s definitely made me reconsider using Firefox plenty of times.
And this list doesn’t even mention containers! They are a really nice feature, not just for quarantining abusive surveillance companies like Facebook but also just maintaining multiple profiles for websites, etc.
It’s a shame Firefox market share is dwindling to nothing. Also TBH I switched from Firefox to Chrome about a year ago, mostly because I got a Chromebook. And.. a little less friction with Chrome. Mostly things work fine in Firefox but there’s just enough problems it was a relief to use the majority browser.
I use Firefox Developer most of the times as it has more tools, but it can be buggy for lesser used stuff like XML/XSLT and Webcomponents, so I often have to use Chrome as a sidekick.
Firefox’s lack of PWA support frustrates me as well. The Web is the best application platform you can get nowadays, but it feeling like a second-class citizen on the desktop sucks quite badly.
Being able to open Navidrome’s web player in its own separate, first-class window instead of just a browser tab is a huge usability boon for me. (One of the few things I use Chrome for, in fact.)
Firefox had Site-Specific Browser (SSB) at one point, but required browser.ssb.enabled in about:config where only nerds following the project knew about it. Naturally it was shipped quite buggy, so Mozilla gave it the ax saying this Fx feature lacked users (which no one knew about it & those tweaking about:config are more likely to disable telemetry) & had bugs (since they put little effort into it & with no users, had no bug reports). There was even a Linux distro largely based around SSB to have apps too which had to find an alternative. At a ex-employer, we were considering it as well when the plug was pulled during the project—so we had to drop Fx support.
I’ve been using firefox nightly on android for a long while now, and I’m mostly happy. They recently seem to have replaced the menu you get when you tap the three dots though, and the new one doesn’t have back forward and refresh buttons, which is… not great :s
I can use the built in android back button, and I can select the url bar, edit nothing then hit go again as workarounds for back and refresh, but I haven’t found a workaround for the missing forwards button yet :(
What I miss the most on any Firefox variant is native PWA support. I do use PWA with Safari or other Chromium variant in Windows or Linux but Firefox not supporting it was backwards choice.
just the fact that uBlock Origin just works on mobile. How the heck do people browse at all without ad blocking?
I find that DNS-based ad blocking works surprisingly well, and there are lots of ways to get that (depending on your OS). I guess not many people use it, or the evil people would be working harder to get around it.
Ublock style adblocking where the whole ad element is removed rather just blocking the request that the ad element makes a lot of difference. I guess it depends on your prespective. But the former to me feels almost utopian.
Custom rules and the element picker is another great differentiator. The ability to easily get rid of stuff that you find annoying but the blocklist maintainers don’t consider relevant is great.
I have my own custom DoH server that does adblocking, and it gets rid of nearly every ad I’ve ever seen on iOS Safari (except YouTube, but I have Rehike to handle YouTube requests).
I never browser the web on mobile, it’s such a horrid experience and not because of ads. Maybe some day it’ll change but tbh I use my phone for Youtube/ Music and phone calls and the camera and that’s it. It’s just god awful at browsing ime.
depends entirely how lazy I am at that moment or if I’m out and about and just have the phone on me
in those circumstances it’s fine
I use NextDNS, and it works really well
Firefox Mobile is pretty good. It’s a shame they’ve stopped supporting the platform it was born in (Linux Maemo-Meego-Mer, now succeeded by SailfishOS). Niche mobile OSes need a modern browser to be a viable alternative. My N9 was usable way past its expiration date because it had a relatively fresh Firefox.
It’s also a shame they dropped their classic architecture and their customization ethos. I understand there were security issues, but they should have tried not to throw the baby with the bathwater. Vimperator was the very best browsing experience I have had on any platform, and it’s gone. Vim in the browser with nearly zero glitches, fast and no ads.
From what I remember, it wasn’t security issues. It’s that they tried several times with things like the Jetpack API before admitting to themselves that turning every bit of the browser internals into a de facto API surface was hogtying their ability to re-architect to catch up with Chrome’s multi-process architecture.
Reminds me of what a PITA it is to get all the edge-cases right when extending Vim when everything is monkey-patching keybindings willy-nilly as if they’re DOS TSRs or Mac OS INITs instead of using a proper plugin API.
That’s true, but security also played a role. There’s a post in Tridactyl’s mailing / issues list (can’t find it now) explaining how Mozilla is reluctant to give plugins the ability to change too much of the UI. Therefore, there new APIs do not offer that possibility. There were talks about creating APIs for privileged plugins, but it never panned out. A shame.
I’ve been using cromite for a relatively long time. It had a relatively good adblock and a dark reader — which are the replacements for the only two extensions I have in Firefox on mobile. Since Firefox had added process isolation for tabs I’m back to using it though
My favourite feature of Firefox mobile is being able to put the URL bar on the bottom of the screen. I wish I could buy a phone with good specs and a screen about the size of the original iPhone so I could actually reach the top bar without contorting my hand too much, but since I can’t I’ll happily take the bottom bar instead.
The only deal breaker for me is that it’s missing keyboard controls, so if I decide to pack light on a trip and want to do some programming on the go with my tablet and a BT keyboard, I have to either use Chrome for browsing the internet or get a very annoying experience on Firefox.
Vivaldi (Chromium based) has the bottom tab bar & address bar feature too on mobile, plus a bunch of other customizations. It is refreshing!
It’d sad how much Android keyboard handling has regressed. In the early days we had configurable keyboard shortcuts and a consistent menus that were accessible using hardware buttons or the keyboard. Apps usually had good keyboard support too. Nowadays we get to play “hunt the hamburger” or “guess what to tap” instead.
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Don’t all mobile browsers do that nowadays? Safari has had this feature since iOS 14 or 15 I think, 3 or 4 years ago, and it was already late to the game.
Yeah, most should. I recall the first relatively popular was either IE or Edge, on Windows Phone 10 years ago.
Refurbished iPhone 13 Mini
What’s a good site for refurb iPhones?
Directly from Apple is actually reasonably priced. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have any refurb 13 minis in stock. I’m ride or die with the 12 mini until there’s a worthy challenger for a mini phone.
I’m afraid I’m waiting for that kind of challenger, too. I love my 2022 SE, but apps and sites are not adequately testing on that screen size anymore. Navigation apps have gotten especially frustrating. I’m hoping against hope that the next mini maintains TouchID, because I really don’t like FaceID on my phone, but all signs point to “no” on that front.
I’d halfway be happier to get a less expensive flip phone that I could tether a tablet to, and carry both things, but I don’t see any evidence of one of those either.
Not refurb, but I’ve been buying all iPhones both for myself and family members used from swappa.com for years. It’s worked great for me, zero issues and you save a lot of money.
The equivalent for Europe is swappie.com. They make it very easy to trade-in your old phone give you a proper chargeback. I think started operating from Finland but now have warehouses in different countries. e.g. Germany, which makes shipping pretty fast.
Best Buy seems to have a whole bunch. Not sure if third-party seller though.
Chrome’s browser history and address bar behavior are unusable for me. Chrome deletes browsing history after 90 days. Browsing history is a big part of my workflow because I remember a lot of URLs partially, so all I have to do to bring the page up in Firefox is type a fragment of them. To support this, I’ve configured Firefox to store browsing history indefinitely (very cool that you can configure this).
I had to look this up, because my first assumption was that this had to be an unintentional user misconfiguration, because a default of deleting history after 90 days would be incredibly annoying. I’m pretty shocked to find that it’s entirely correct, and that there doesn’t appear to be any way to configure it or even any warning to users.
On Firefox I use the history as an alternate search, and I’ve definitely often had successful results that were older than a year. I hate the idea that my browser might silently drop useful data, or not warn me that it’d do that.
I guess maybe people’s expecations have changed and they now see history as a liability rather than a tool? Though if so, I’d entirely blame that on Google and it’s friends.
Right?? I have to use Chrome at work and it’s insufferable. I agree so strongly with everything you’ve said.
On desktop I agree that it is great. But on mobile the search from the URL bar is atrocious. It seems inconsistent and often get some results quickly than the good ones later, or for some reason just can’t get it to show the URL I want.
I love Firefox and open source. But the little chips in the armor and gravity of the chrome ecosystem for my day job was too much.
I dropped Firefox for a weird bug in Google hangouts/meet/video where my audio when using an analog to USB converter would make me sound like a robot. No clue if it’s their fault or Google’s or the makers of the Motu 2 I’m using. I tried making some videos to report it be it was really hard as it needed a 2-3 devices and a video session and the devices couldn’t be in the same room since I needed to demo audio to reproduce the problem.
Prior to that I hit an annoying but non-blocking bug that I reported about 6 years ago. Others have commented they have the same issue. No progress https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1528442
I wish I could “trade” some open source time where I’m equipped to take on Ruby or Rust contributions, for a foreign ecosystem where someone else is more equipped. I’ve wondered if I’m alone in that want or if there could be some sort of bartering marketplace for work hours on open projects rather than for money.
I ended up just using the Google Meet PWA with Chrome (in its own segregated window, as if it were a regular application), and Firefox for everything else
This very much sounds like a sample rate mismatch between your Audio Interface and OS, e.g. the MOTU M2 runs at 48kHz, while the OS expects a sample rate of 44.1kHz for the device. It’s a bit odd that this is limited to Firefox.
I have the same situation, but my solution is to use Chrome for Google Workspace pages exclusively, and Firefox (esp. w/ Containers) for everything else, on both work and personal devices. Aside from some YouTube hiccups that crop up about once a year, Firefox works just as well for everything that isn’t Google Workspaces.
For me, Firefox Containers feel like the “right” way to do what Chrome instead (I assume?) expects you to do via multiple signed in Accounts in the browser itself.
So long as Firefox views its purpose as “building an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry,” it cannot ever be superior [1].
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/
Your choices when it comes to the internet are:
There is no secret third thing. Please indicate your preference from the above choices.
The Internet is already Thing 1 and Thing 2. Take a dose of revolutionary optimism and think just a little bit bigger than capitalist realism.
Perhaps one day in the future we will all live in a post-scarcity utopia where effectively-unlimited compute power and bandwidth are free of charge to all.
Today, we do not live in that world. Today, compute power and bandwidth cost money. So, either you have an internet where every person’s presence must be paid for by that person out of their own pocket and those who can’t afford that are barred from it, or you have an internet where some people can have a presence without paying. Thus far the only we we’ve figured out of actually pulling off the latter at sufficient scale to let the world participate is via advertising; there are not enough donors with deep enough pockets to do it via charity.
Once again: please indicate your preference.
Are you sure that’s the only way? Can you genuinely think of no routes to an alternative?
If you have another way which already exists and already works at sufficient scale, right here, right now, today, feel free to point to it.
Otherwise, please indicate your preference from the options available today.
You and I are already on it. It’s the Fediverse. Feel free to complain about “sufficient scale” though.
We cannot change the world by conforming to its every constraint. Instead, we build the alternatives of tomorrow, today.
Fediverse is for hobbyists, it does not address the monetization issue.
From the perspective of the content provider / publisher: a publishing / tooling web business (even if small) has as possible income sources mainly the options provided above (paid accounts and ads). Nobody figured out another better way to build a business on the web yet, which I think is @ubernostrum’s point.
Even just a non-business personal web presence is a problem. Either you pay for your web presence or someone else pays for it, and the only successful way we’ve found to do “someone else pays for it” is to have the someone else be an advertiser who gets ads on the page in exchange for their money. And even then it hasn’t always been enough – Geocities, which so many people nostalgically yearn for, had ads and still struggled financially.
The only “successful” way? Well it wasn’t successful in the case of Geocities was it? Neocities on the other hand still exists.
Remains to be seen if it can actually hold up. The cost in both money and time to run instances is non-trivial, and it’s a cliché to point out instances whose admins burn out/flame out.
Also, yeah, I will complain about the “sufficient scale”. Big, huge, gigantic instances tend to range from ten thousand or so up to perhaps a couple hundred thousand active accounts. Even if you have a bunch of instances in that size group, you’re looking at roughly the population of a good-sized city. We live in a world of billions of people.
Obviously a larger Fediverse user base would come with a larger donor base. What makes you so sure the increased revenue would not keep up with with the increased costs?
Wikipedia, which I mentioned the last time we talked about this.
I would still be curious to understand what you meant in your reply to the linked comment, but perhaps you changed your position. You haven’t completely abandoned it though so there should still be plenty to discuss!
The demand to “indicate your preference” rings hollow when the Internet is already both things, as @aspensmonster pointed out. There is no realistic proposal to avoid either one; it will always be a spectrum.
I would like to ask once again if you really think the web would be poorer if websites were less like Facebook and Twitter and more like Wikipedia and Lobsters?
My home internet connection is right now $83 / month. (It used to be $15 :( but the cable company keeps jacking it up… even though it delivers very little more practical benefit to me than it used to…)
That internet connection would be absolutely worthless if there was nobody on the other side to connect to. Maybe some fraction of that $83 / month could go to the people who make the internet valuable as well as the people who make the internet possible? I’m not saying the cable company is worthless, just that maybe we could find some way to spread the money without advertising middle men. (The money to pay for ads also ultimately comes from the users who buy the products…)
Does this make poor people second class or forbidden? Well, if I didn’t pay my cable bill, they wouldn’t let me connect anymore sooooooooo already reality? And a lot of the best on line content is behind additional paywalls now too - even with the advertising. So eh, maybe this isn’t an ideal situation but it at least doesn’t seem much worse than it is now.
I won’t fall for the false dichotomy. The web was not as hostile in the 90s and 00s. Yes, there were flashing ad banners in places, but it was, overall, much less invasive (spying/tracking).
Communities grew out of passions and common interests. Not every single fucking thing needed to be a profitable endeavor. (Look at Reddit in the early days)
I feel like we’ve become more and more like the Ferengi species from Star Trek.
The Ferengi were always a metaphor for western capitalist societies in general, and the US in particular. Check out the Lower Decks episode where Boimler gets trapped in an hotel on Ferenginar for a weekend because he has no resistance to the addictive nature of Ferengi daytime TV.
No, it is not. The amount of long standing bugs firefox has is astounding. It is very annoying to develop apps for firefox. But the main reason web devs prefer chrome is dev utils.
So because Firefox is worse for developers, it supposedly being better for users is irrelevant?
When I first had the need, firefox dev tools (firebug!) were so much better. It’s been a long while since I tried chrome. What’s better?
The main reason why I switch to Chrome in some situations is that it has a force-focused mode (that’s not the name, but I can never remember the real name) where if you focus an element, then click in the devtools, blur events won’t fire, so you can use devtools to investigate certain popups or elements in particular states that are difficult to explore normally. This is missing in Firefox, and it’s really the only thing that makes me switch to Chrome in a debugging session (outside of generally making sure that my code works in different browsers).
On top of that, in my experience Chrome has slightly better tooling for viewing details about the positions or styles of particular elements, and it has lighthouse built-in. But I’m always sceptical of overly focusing on lighthouse metrics, and the element viewer in Chrome isn’t so much better than Firefox in practice. So most of the time, I don’t feel like I’m missing much.
On the other hand, I don’t think Chrome has a proper flamegraph performance analysis tool, and that’s probably my most-used way of debugging performance issues in the browser. In Chrome you can see how long each function in the stack has taken (which in fairness, is also a useful view to have), but in Firefox you can use the flamegraph view to see which function is running most often as a proportion of the entire time the program has spent running. You can kind of get the same information out of Chrome, but only via a different view, and I find it harder to get a good overview of exactly what’s been going on. It’s also much harder to teach if you’re trying to show someone else how to spot performance issues.
In the end I stick with Firefox, because there’s not a big difference between the two, but there are definitely features in both browsers that would be great to see in the other.
You can right-click an element in the Firefox devtools inspector and there’s a “Change Psuedo-class” menu that lets you force focus/hover/target states, fwiw.
That’s a slightly different case than the one I’m interested, although it’s also useful.
The case I’m interested is having an element that will disappear if it loses focus or if the mouse clicks somewhere else. For example, a popup window that hides itself if the user clicks somewhere else on the screen, or a text field that appears while the user is editing something, and then disappears if they cancel, escape, or focus away from the field. Debugging that element can be quite difficult in Firefox because clicking into the devtools counts as focusing away, which hides the element I’m trying to look at. Importantly, this effect is usually done with Javascript, and so the CSS pseudo-classes don’t necessarily apply.
In Chrome, this is called emulate a focused page and it works really well for these sorts of use-cases.
Chrome has a few extra really useful tools in its DevTools panel. Yesterday I used the Layers tool to debug a weird stacking bug I had on my website. Chrome’s DevTools also have proper support for debugging WebSockets connections—in the Network tab, you can click on any WebSockets request and it’ll show you the incoming/outgoing messages streaming in over time. The network throttling in Chrome also seems a lot more effective than Firefox’s implementation (since it actually throttles bandwidth at a very low level, which causes WebSockets to stall—not something Firefox can do.)
There are also differences between error and warning messages in the two browsers. Sometimes the errors in Chrome can be less cryptic, sometimes the ones in Firefox are better—it’s a bit hit or miss depending on what API you use.
Myself I primarily use Firefox for development, simply because it’s my main browser and has most of the tools I need. I only use Chrome for the aforementioned tools Firefox seems to be missing.
And personal opinion: I find Firefox’s DevTools panel a lot more intuitive and less cluttered from a UX perspective. That might be just me being more used to it than Chrome’s though.
Firefox has this, too. If you click on the websocket negotiation request, the response tab will show you websocket messages in real time.
Ooh, that’s sweet! Must be a recent addition, I remember it not being there just a couple months ago —w—
I think it’s been there a while… looks like it was released five years ago. 😉
It’s definitely hard to know when new features are added though… The tools need to do a better job of announcing new things.
Huh! I’m pretty sure I was clicking through all the menus trying to find it… Well, no matter. It’s good that it’s there, won’t need to pull out Chrome next time ^^
I’ve been on and off web dev a few times over the last ~15 years and chrome dev tools have always seemed worse. They’re close, but often missing (for example, im working on some content in an… annoyingly restrictive environment right now and the FF style editor has been super useful, chrome doesn’t have that)
As far as bugs in foundational APIs and layout, ive found a couple issues in both but as long as you aren’t working with technologies that came out last week, they mostly just work, dev experience wise.
The other day I was trying to troubleshoot something network-related in Chrome, and the network dev tools felt clunky to me. It seemed like I could never find the right button to get this or that info, but I wrote off the issue as me being more familiar with Firefox’s network UI, as opposed to Chrome’s UI being worse. (Though both could be true!)
I don’t think it’s you holding it wrong. Chrome’s network inspector has been much worse than Firefox’s for years. The biggest single bug I’ve seen with it is that Chrome’s network inspector used to give very incorrect output on CORS failures until quite recently. It had bugs that appeared to stem from how it was eliding the CORS preflight requests.
Huh, it actually was a CORS issue I was troubleshooting!
Ah yeah, if you can, switch to Firefox for debugging CORS issues because the network inspector actually works.
Every open-source project that lasts long enough and becomes popular enough will have “astounding” numbers of “long standing bugs” open on its tracker.
Not true at all. Projects run by RedHat avoid this by having an automated tool that closes every bug that has received no comments for six months.
Which means that it’s a bug just ignored. If that happens and I can, I’ll abondon the project or reporting issues. Obviously it’s not wanted anyways.
I assume the parent post is dry sarcasm. I understand the metrics mindset that makes product owners auto-close bugs, but I can’t imagine any user thinking it’s a good strategy.
The most popular open source project is SQLite. Doesn’t seem to hold:
https://www.sqlite.org/src/wiki?name=Bug+Reports
https://www.sqlite.org/src/rptview/1
Not sure if you mean web apps or extensions, but building extensions for both chrome and FF is a lot worse than web apps. Their APIs are close enough that it’s doable, but most things have subtle or unsubtle differences that require lots of special casing each target.
Although it’s unpopular, manifest v3 APIs have made this situation a lot better.
For me the dev utils are major part of preferring Firefox. I hate it when I open a coworkers network tab, click on a request and find that the essential information to troubleshoot is simply missing.
Then back to my computer and hoping I can reproduce the issue.
For me, it’s multi-account containers. I can’t believe Firefox is the only browser that has that.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
Sadly, it not available in Firefox for Android.
I’ve got 4 privacy and security enhanced browsers on my mobile. Vanadium and Chromite are based on Chrome, Fennec and Mull are based on Firefox. All have ad blocking. If you want ad blocking in a Chrome based mobile browser, that’s available, you just can’t get it directly from Google is all.
Fennec and Mull have the same extensions as Firefox Mobile, and they have about:config. These apps are versions of Firefox Mobile, modified to prioritize the needs of power users over the needs of corporations, so of course they are fully configurable.
Instead of 🙏🏿ing the Mozilla corporation, just install Fennec! (Or Mull if you want extra privacy hardening beyond what Fennec does.)
I install most of my mobile browsers from the F-Droid app store (not Vanadium). I recommend F-Droid because all of the apps are vetted to ensure that they meet the F-Droid standards of prioritizing the needs of users over the needs of corporations. All the apps are free/open source, there’s generally no telemetry, in app advertising, or other “anti-features”. Some anti-features are allowed but you see a warning before you download. In the case of Fennec, F-Droid warns me that although telemetry is removed, Fennec may still connect to Mozilla services that can track users (eg, the extensions store).
I just wish Firefox’s performance on Windows resembled anything like Chrome’s. It’s a complete memory hog, if you have even a few tabs open it easily chugs down gigabytes of memory, and it doesn’t seem to have a tab suspension feature that actually works. I’m not really sure what the deal here is, but I finally had to switch away because I just couldn’t handle it locking up my system (even with 16 GB of RAM!). Some of this is surely Windows’ fault, but Chrome doesn’t do this.
Had a similar issue with Firefox on Alpine (Edge). My problem was CPU related - spiking upwards to 95% every 10-15 minutes with regular web browsing. Chromium barely hits ~10% doing the same activities…
I love Firefox, but my understanding is Firefox mobile still doesn’t have process based site isolation, which is a huge security problem.
Oof. That is bad enough that I would not use Firefox mobile without NoScript.
Seems accurate, I just looked at about:processes on mobile Nightly and it showed several “shared web process”. Unfortunate, but I’ll keep using it for now.
Also seems like setting
fission.autostartno longer works. It just gets reset every launch.It was possible to have per-domain processes like on desktop, though they still had no sandboxing truly isolating them.
This is not relevant to most users but the fact that I can build Firefox on my computer in a sane amount of time was such a relief when I switched back last year. Chromium takes literally 10x as long to build.
A weird overview of things that I don’t really need and the Extensions are more of a liability than anything else.
I’ve been on a bit of a neo-browser trip recently trying out:
Extensions expand the surface of your browser in every possible bad way. No guarantees that anything in an extension will keep working so better not base anything critical on it.
What makes you say that?
They’re defocused, which may well be the same thing: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24279020/browser-company-ai-browser-arc
Chrome for mobile opens PDFs inline.
At least on Android it doesn’t, unless there’s some config I’m missing? I just tried that today, it’s incredibly annoying having to switch to another app.
It does for me. Chrome 131.0.6778.81, Android 15
Not working here, Chrome 131.0.6778.104 Android 14, example PDF https://hcs64.com/files/pd1-3-schorre.pdf
Edit: Looks like it’s just now rolling out, though I enabled chrome://flags/#android-open-pdf-inline and it still doesn’t seem to be working, maybe it’s a different flag.
Edit2: yeah I’d need 132 (current beta) and another flag to run it on Android 14:
https://www.androidauthority.com/open-pdf-files-chrome-android-3505618/
Oh wow thanks for that link. This is honestly a massive quality of life improvement, no idea how it took them this long to finally port over such basic functionality.
It’s about 2 years since it was enabled in Firefox (I’d mentioned it at the time here). Though this is a somewhat different thing in Chrome, it uses the system PDF renderer, while Firefox uses pdf.js same as on the desktop.
I don’t know, it works for me, I don’t have any flags enabled. Maybe I’m part of an experiment.
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The elephant in the room is performance. Firefox, for whatever reason, is significantly worse than Chrome in weird pathological conditions that always occur given the uptime/usage of a primary browser. It’s really the only remaining problem, but it’s definitely made me reconsider using Firefox plenty of times.
And this list doesn’t even mention containers! They are a really nice feature, not just for quarantining abusive surveillance companies like Facebook but also just maintaining multiple profiles for websites, etc.
It’s a shame Firefox market share is dwindling to nothing. Also TBH I switched from Firefox to Chrome about a year ago, mostly because I got a Chromebook. And.. a little less friction with Chrome. Mostly things work fine in Firefox but there’s just enough problems it was a relief to use the majority browser.
Which is a better browser for web dev?
I use Firefox Developer most of the times as it has more tools, but it can be buggy for lesser used stuff like XML/XSLT and Webcomponents, so I often have to use Chrome as a sidekick.
Sadly firefox does not support pwa, thus i cant convert my friends from chrome to ff
Firefox’s lack of PWA support frustrates me as well. The Web is the best application platform you can get nowadays, but it feeling like a second-class citizen on the desktop sucks quite badly.
Being able to open Navidrome’s web player in its own separate, first-class window instead of just a browser tab is a huge usability boon for me. (One of the few things I use Chrome for, in fact.)
Firefox had Site-Specific Browser (SSB) at one point, but required
browser.ssb.enabledinabout:configwhere only nerds following the project knew about it. Naturally it was shipped quite buggy, so Mozilla gave it the ax saying this Fx feature lacked users (which no one knew about it & those tweakingabout:configare more likely to disable telemetry) & had bugs (since they put little effort into it & with no users, had no bug reports). There was even a Linux distro largely based around SSB to have apps too which had to find an alternative. At a ex-employer, we were considering it as well when the plug was pulled during the project—so we had to drop Fx support.Btw, instead of
about:configyou can usechrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtmlI’ve been using firefox nightly on android for a long while now, and I’m mostly happy. They recently seem to have replaced the menu you get when you tap the three dots though, and the new one doesn’t have back forward and refresh buttons, which is… not great :s
I can use the built in android back button, and I can select the url bar, edit nothing then hit go again as workarounds for back and refresh, but I haven’t found a workaround for the missing forwards button yet :(
Posts like these make me wish third-party browsers on ios sucked less. I want extensions too :(
What I miss the most on any Firefox variant is native PWA support. I do use PWA with Safari or other Chromium variant in Windows or Linux but Firefox not supporting it was backwards choice.