Yeah I think that’s a big part of it. Most people who like to throw shade at Firefox prefer some niche browser or other, because that meets their particular preferences, priorities and needs better.
Vertical tabs conserve horizontal screen space; important as displays lose more and more height and gain more width with each year.
Switching tabs using the mouse requires a large (> 100px) and non-predictable (due to varying tab widths) amount of hand movement; vertical tabs always take the same, small movement.
Horizontal tabs start to get compressed and increasingly harder to read with >8 tabs; vertical tabs always keep the same width.
These are the functional reasons, but this doesn’t mean that vertical tabs should allowed to be aesthetically repulsive, just as long as they provide these features.
I’m an unusual edge case where UX is concerned so I’ll appreciate your radically different perspective and thank you for taking the time to elucidate it!
For me, the mouse is a productivity vampire. I avoid it like the plague. I use keyboard based random access to get to tabs and never have more than 9 open at once so it’s never a problem.
I have fine and gross motor difficulties so getting the mouse to move where I want and to actually hit the accursed tiny clicky thing is torture :)
Yeah, I don’t really understand this conception. I have the hardest time trying to convince my friends to switch, they always state it’s too much of a hassle. What hassle? Bookmarks, history, passwords and even settings all automatically imported on first run. Thanks to web extensions, most extensions are a simple re-install away (or worst case alternatives are easily found with a quick search).
Same here. Containers are nice but I use profiles a lot in Chrome. Having the separation of history is useful. Firefox still doesn’t have a good way of managing profiles.
I’m using different profiles, a personal one, and a work one, and it works great. I’ve never used multiple profiles on chrome though, so I don’t know how it would compare.
On the same machine (2011 27” iMac, Debian, 16 Gb RAM, 3.6 Ghz i5) Chromium is noticeably snappier, smoother, and less glitchy.
Right now, even as I’m typing this, I’m experiencing a glitch where popup menus (from right click or clicking the >> button, for example) show up for a fraction of a second and disappear.
A brief look suggests that vim-vixen has far fewer features. Tridactyl wasn’t necessarily hard to use. It just took awhile to perfect my setup. One really nice feature it has is that I can configure it via a vim-style config file on disk that keeps everything consistent and under my control through all my workstations.
Enable WebRender (set gfx.webrender.enabled and gfx.webrender.all to true in about:config), restart FF and it’ll be almost as fast as Chromium in most tasks, faster in some.
I switched over this morning after going back and forth between it and Chromium a few times in the past. Chromium’s UI is better, but I haven’t had any problems with rendering yet.
I wonder if Chromium-based browsers such as ungoogled-chromium or Brave will try to maintain the “blocking capabilities of the webRequest API” themselves.
Uninformed guess? Sure. The code will still be there for enterprise users apparently. Hard to redesign the whole browser such that the existing code can’t still be used.
They could just rip it off from source and deploy (runtime download) adblocking code through signed binary blob. IIRC drm plugins already work like this.
I mean, organizations (and people!) respond to their incentives. To the first approximation, advertising is the only way Google knows how to make money, so they will always act with that pressure in mind. Personally, I don’t use any Google services or software, but that’s not a scalable solution. There is no way for Google’s livestock users to exert market pressure on Google, so don’t expect this to get better.
Regardless of what happens with Chrome’s manifest v3 proposals, we want to ensure that ad-blockers and other similarly powerful extensions that contribute to user safety and privacy remain part of Mozilla’s add-ons ecosystem while also making sure that users are not being exposed to extreme risks via malicious use of powerful APIs.
If it’s about the signed extension thing, please read about the history of that feature It is not based on threat models and predictions. It was done this way to get rid of adware that was auto-installing itself and making real-world people’s lives worse. It has to be hard-coded into the EXE, because it’s only the EXE that Windows performs signature checks on and that Mozilla can sue adware developers for impersonating.
I maintain quite a few open-source projects, and contribute to others. They all make choices about what they support and what they don’t. Is it sinister of them to do so? Many of them don’t provide any sort of toggle to make them support things the developers have chosen not to support, which is what you seem to object to. Is that really controlling behavior, or just developers disagreeing about what should be supported?
My issue is that it’s user-hostile to prevent users from doing what they want with their computers. Firefox runs on my computer; I as an end user — and my grandparents as end-users — should be free to determine which extensions I run within Firefox. It’s not Mozilla’s computer to control. The ability to choose how to use one’s computer shouldn’t be reserved to developers: it should be available to everyone.
Lets pretend that few users that keep ad blocker will actually kill Google revenue. I don’t even know what to say, except that everyday various teams in not-to-be-evil-company think that we are all squirrels and will eat up any nonsensical argument.
Collective whining about this lasts already for few years. Its time for more radical measures.
Chromium should get a fork at this point. No way we can allow every bad script to run in the browser. From a security stand point, this is the worst thing that can happen on the web.
What’s the biggest irony in all this is that Firefox is in bigger need of serious fork and development than Chrome. I find Firefox just atrocious! Reading comments on twitter and rest of the internet I can safely say that I am not in majority, but FFs performance on my Macbook Pro 13” 2015 are just terrible. Everything is laggy, fans are rumblin all the time and machine is hot. I will keep hanging to Ungoogled Chromium for as long as I can. I would use Safari otherwise but uBlock Origin is not an option there, so I decline to use any browser without it.
There is a group of users consistently reporting atrocious performance on macOS, but it’s not a typical Firefox behavior. It has to be some pathological interaction with some particular system version, software, or GPU driver.
I am using Firefox since quantum on several macOS machines and it’s consistently faaaaast. Super smooth out of the box. Feels faster than Chrome.
Yeah, I think this is just… the modern web. Between impossible-to-efficiently-implement w3c specs & not-concerned-with-performance development practices, webtech has just gotten progressively slower and buggier ever since Moore’s law stopped.
I periodically switched between chrome & firefox based on which one was marginally more performant, but they behave roughly the same these days. I’d switch back to firefox in order to fix ad blocking if it weren’t the case that, on the machine where I can’t run chrome, that certificate snafu broke all my ad-blocking plugins for firefox & seemingly hasn’t resolved yet…
the author of uBlock weighed in on this https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-496009417
Raymond Gorhill is a hero. Is there any way to support them financially?
He actively doesn’t want donations:
But, you know, like he said… spare a thought for those poor filter list maintainers. :)
Smart man. Follow the money.
I really need to make the effort and transition to FF.
It’s really not an effort. Firefox is just a better browser at this point.
Yet Firefox gets a LOT of hate for…. Just about everything.
Given that it’s the only 100% open source browser with any market share to speak of, I struggle to understand people’s stance on this.
Higher expectations, I suppose
Yeah I think that’s a big part of it. Most people who like to throw shade at Firefox prefer some niche browser or other, because that meets their particular preferences, priorities and needs better.
Lack of vertical tabs.
:-P
Can you articulate why lack of vertical tabs is such a deal breaker for you? Just aesthetics or is there a functional reason?
These are the functional reasons, but this doesn’t mean that vertical tabs should allowed to be aesthetically repulsive, just as long as they provide these features.
Compare this dog’s breakfast Firefox devs force upon people with this design for instance.
I’m an unusual edge case where UX is concerned so I’ll appreciate your radically different perspective and thank you for taking the time to elucidate it!
For me, the mouse is a productivity vampire. I avoid it like the plague. I use keyboard based random access to get to tabs and never have more than 9 open at once so it’s never a problem.
I have fine and gross motor difficulties so getting the mouse to move where I want and to actually hit the accursed tiny clicky thing is torture :)
Yeah, I don’t really understand this conception. I have the hardest time trying to convince my friends to switch, they always state it’s too much of a hassle. What hassle? Bookmarks, history, passwords and even settings all automatically imported on first run. Thanks to web extensions, most extensions are a simple re-install away (or worst case alternatives are easily found with a quick search).
That´s all true both, and yet there is something freaking sticky about Chrome. But you are completely right.
do they have user-friendly multiprofile? That’s always been the blocker for me
Same here. Containers are nice but I use profiles a lot in Chrome. Having the separation of history is useful. Firefox still doesn’t have a good way of managing profiles.
I’m using different profiles, a personal one, and a work one, and it works great. I’ve never used multiple profiles on chrome though, so I don’t know how it would compare.
Chrome profiles are a first-class feature available by clicking on your profile picture on the menu bar: https://imgur.com/a/j6vIeG2
While Firefox has profiles, they seem a bit tedious to set up and manage https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles. It looks like the only way of controlling them is through
about:profiles- do you use them this way or some other way?I’m afraid I do use them through
about:profiles. Chrome’s do look better, I must say, but Firefox’s work well enough for me :)Chromium’s UI is better than Firefox, IMO.
On the same machine (2011 27” iMac, Debian, 16 Gb RAM, 3.6 Ghz i5) Chromium is noticeably snappier, smoother, and less glitchy.
Right now, even as I’m typing this, I’m experiencing a glitch where popup menus (from right click or clicking the >> button, for example) show up for a fraction of a second and disappear.
It is an effort. I switched a few months ago and it took me a few solid weeks to get comfy. I had to sink lots of time into configuring tridactyl.
Just depends of workflows really.
Other things that require a similar level of effort (or more): changing your email client, changing your shell, changing your window manager.
I suppose I am a rather vanilla browser user - I hadn’t considered more niche use cases.
Sidebar: thank you for making
ripgrep! I use it daily and love it.FWIW I find vim-vixen much easier to get going with than tridactyl.
A brief look suggests that vim-vixen has far fewer features. Tridactyl wasn’t necessarily hard to use. It just took awhile to perfect my setup. One really nice feature it has is that I can configure it via a vim-style config file on disk that keeps everything consistent and under my control through all my workstations.
I admit, I basically only use j, k, f, and / for the most part. Perhaps I don’t know what I’m missing.
I don’t use too much more, but this is my config: https://gist.github.com/BurntSushi/393546a65db38d57cedcfd72c6d89bf3
We fixed
set findcase smarta few days ago by the way. No-one else had mentioned it. It isn’t quite in a stable release yet but will be soon.Thanks! :)
Enable WebRender (set
gfx.webrender.enabledandgfx.webrender.alltotrueinabout:config), restart FF and it’ll be almost as fast as Chromium in most tasks, faster in some.I switched over this morning after going back and forth between it and Chromium a few times in the past. Chromium’s UI is better, but I haven’t had any problems with rendering yet.
I’d love to use https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next, but it doesn’t have uMatrix or an adblocker yet, so I’m not going to use it full time.
I wonder if Chromium-based browsers such as ungoogled-chromium or Brave will try to maintain the “blocking capabilities of the webRequest API” themselves.
Uninformed guess? Sure. The code will still be there for enterprise users apparently. Hard to redesign the whole browser such that the existing code can’t still be used.
They could just rip it off from source and deploy (runtime download) adblocking code through signed binary blob. IIRC drm plugins already work like this.
Brave definitely will:
This is good news for Brave users, and also for other Chromium-based browsers!
I mean, organizations (and people!) respond to their incentives. To the first approximation, advertising is the only way Google knows how to make money, so they will always act with that pressure in mind. Personally, I don’t use any Google services or software, but that’s not a scalable solution. There is no way for Google’s
livestockusers to exert market pressure on Google, so don’t expect this to get better.I don’t understand why people are surprised by this. I’m not saying I like it, but I don’t know what else people expect.
who said anyone is surprised by it? people can be upset without being surprised.
Even now, I’m sure some people will reject the claim that Google is first and foremost, and advertising company.
At this point I think we need a peoples firefox fork with all the bullshit stripped away. I’ll pay $5/month for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox
The end of controlling what you see on the Web is coming.
Not if you switch to Firefox :)
I really hope Google is shooting themselves (and Chrome’s market share) in the foot with this move… but somehow I doubt it.
Firefox development is mostly funded by Google. I can’t imagine them doing much to piss Google off.
Firefox is going to migrate to Manifest v3. Their comments aren’t really reassuring.
This actually sounds reassuring:
This part is scary.
Yeah, but …
We have those APIs now isn’t it ? And the world isn’t collapsing.
The scary part is that Firefox thinks it’s their job to decide how users use their own computers.
It’s kind of impossible not to if you’re creating consumer facing software, isn’t it?
It’s one thing to provide safe defaults, and another thing entirely to ensure that those defaults can’t be overridden.
If it’s about the signed extension thing, please read about the history of that feature It is not based on threat models and predictions. It was done this way to get rid of adware that was auto-installing itself and making real-world people’s lives worse. It has to be hard-coded into the EXE, because it’s only the EXE that Windows performs signature checks on and that Mozilla can sue adware developers for impersonating.
Alright. If it doesn’t affect people building from source, I guess it doesn’t matter.
So… block it on Windows?
It’s one thing to provide safe defaults, and another thing entirely to ensure that those defaults can’t be overridden.
I never understand this sort of rhetoric.
I maintain quite a few open-source projects, and contribute to others. They all make choices about what they support and what they don’t. Is it sinister of them to do so? Many of them don’t provide any sort of toggle to make them support things the developers have chosen not to support, which is what you seem to object to. Is that really controlling behavior, or just developers disagreeing about what should be supported?
My issue is that it’s user-hostile to prevent users from doing what they want with their computers. Firefox runs on my computer; I as an end user — and my grandparents as end-users — should be free to determine which extensions I run within Firefox. It’s not Mozilla’s computer to control. The ability to choose how to use one’s computer shouldn’t be reserved to developers: it should be available to everyone.
Mozilla is free to develop the software they want to develop. You’re free to not use it.
You don’t have the right to force them to develop something they don’t want to, but you seem to be trying to assert such a right.
Or, rely on blocklists: https://firebog.net/ I’ve got a little side project to automate it: https://gitlab.com/dacav/myofb
If you want something more complex, more popular, more user-friendlly: pi-hole
Until they fully control DNS as well with something like DoH.
Ah, this cat-and-mouse thing! :) Let’s try. You play adversary :)
My next move is to use the blacklist to place a filter at firewall level instead of using it at dns level.
Your move
Or use /etc/hosts
That’s actually one of the options of my scripts: populating /etc/hosts. :)
Proxying ads through the website you want to see, so the ad urls are
http://destination.com/double click/ad/1234Definitely. But the website gets a performance penalisation, I think.
Plus, I’m wondering, will it be as effective for the trackers to deal with the tracked browser with a proxy server in between? (maybe, maybe not).
I place Ads and DoH on the same IP address as the CDN that millions of websites use.
Wait what? I don’t get this one. How many millions of websites are passing through the same IP address? Can you elaborate?
Many of the ones that sit behind CloudFlare and Fastly.
This is amazing.
Lets pretend that few users that keep ad blocker will actually kill Google revenue. I don’t even know what to say, except that everyday various teams in not-to-be-evil-company think that we are all squirrels and will eat up any nonsensical argument.
Collective whining about this lasts already for few years. Its time for more radical measures.
Okay …?
Something more organized. Thinking about it…
Chromium should get a fork at this point. No way we can allow every bad script to run in the browser. From a security stand point, this is the worst thing that can happen on the web.
How about https://iridiumbrowser.de/ ?
What’s the biggest irony in all this is that Firefox is in bigger need of serious fork and development than Chrome. I find Firefox just atrocious! Reading comments on twitter and rest of the internet I can safely say that I am not in majority, but FFs performance on my Macbook Pro 13” 2015 are just terrible. Everything is laggy, fans are rumblin all the time and machine is hot. I will keep hanging to Ungoogled Chromium for as long as I can. I would use Safari otherwise but uBlock Origin is not an option there, so I decline to use any browser without it.
There is a group of users consistently reporting atrocious performance on macOS, but it’s not a typical Firefox behavior. It has to be some pathological interaction with some particular system version, software, or GPU driver.
I am using Firefox since quantum on several macOS machines and it’s consistently faaaaast. Super smooth out of the box. Feels faster than Chrome.
I think you’re a victim of this
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
I’ll look into this since I use scaled res. Thanks
https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/releases
look at the version number and date of last release… soon you won’t be able to use event that.
This has been my experience with every browser I’ve used after Netscape 4.0.
Yeah, I think this is just… the modern web. Between impossible-to-efficiently-implement w3c specs & not-concerned-with-performance development practices, webtech has just gotten progressively slower and buggier ever since Moore’s law stopped.
I periodically switched between chrome & firefox based on which one was marginally more performant, but they behave roughly the same these days. I’d switch back to firefox in order to fix ad blocking if it weren’t the case that, on the machine where I can’t run chrome, that certificate snafu broke all my ad-blocking plugins for firefox & seemingly hasn’t resolved yet…