All the back-and-forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base system abstraction layer for most computing.
I tried several times, but ended up sticking to a sandbox (firejail) + uBlock Origin + HTTPS Everywhere.
I thought of making a script that updates that file automatically, but I can't say I've seen any ads on that laptop even without updating the file for months, so hasn't been my first priority.
It feels exactly like Chrome (it's Chromium-based), but has a built-in adblocker, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, no nagging to sign in, and does not throw "suggested news" (with no opt-out) upon you. Brave's founder is ex-Mozilla's CEO (Brendan Eich).
However latest FF on Android is actually not bad, at least if you have a modern phone (the UI feels slowish though on pre-2016 phones).
- when you swipe fast, the page only scrolls by like 30%, instead of scrolling by 200% like in Chromium browsers. Basically it's impossible to quickly scroll a long page on Firefox (maybe it's configurable somehow in about:config?)
- when you long-press a link, it takes like 2-3 seconds for the menu to open. As I "open in new tab" by default, this quickly adds up.
Google Play store link for Firefox Nightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
Firefox for Android also allows browser extensions, which gives some control of the software back to the user.
The tagline of giving the option to either disable ads or replace ads is to provide a way to enjoy an ad-free experience or to receive only optimized advertisements.
A big reason some users dislike ads isn't because of their entire existance but rather their tendency as of late to be malware-ridden or cause drops in webpage performance. These are the things that cause some users to enable ad-blockers, and Brave is the only way I've heard of that has pushed the envelope of a BETTER ad experience.
From their blog, the first is a great introduction to what Brave is about[1], as well as their response to an attack on their ad-replacement ideology[2].
[1]:https://www.brave.com/how-brave-works-for-you/
[2]:https://www.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-de...
Also a quote directly from Brave:
[The user interface] shows the major choices that Brave enables:
You’re game to try our default mode of operation, for a better ad-supported Web. Just leave the Replace Ads item checked. This is the default mode of operation. We insert ads after blocking without hurting page load speed, and those ads will support the sites you browse. We choose ads based on browser-private user data with no remote tracking — not even by our servers.
You want to block all ads and trackers, but you’re not sure about our plan to insert better ads with high performance and privacy. You can do this with Brave by checking Block Ads. We want you on board even if you’re just blocking everything.
You’d like to try Brave without ad blocking or replacing, to get whatever ads and trackers you would experience in other browsers. Check Allow Ads and Tracking. We still protect you with HTTPS Everywhere and other defense by default.AdBlock Plus also does something equivalent through their default option to show "Unobtrusive ads."
I switched to a better adblocker, so now I just whitelist sites whose ads I'm willing to see.
I read about it on their own website:
https://www.brave.com/about-ad-replacement/
"Brave’s goal is to speed up the web, stop bad ads and pay publishers. One of the ways we plan to accomplish this is with ad replacements."
"Step Two: Brave Replaces Ads"
Link for the other if interested: https://www.brave.com/about-ad-replacement/
Edit: from the link content, I understand they actually backtracked from this proposal after a backlash from publishers.
What do you mean?
First is that certain elements block scrolling. I use FF primarily for Facebook (since FF allows me to use my – shameless plug – idle-time faker extension [1]). If my scrolling thumb lands on the "Like" button of a post, the screen just stays put. So about 1/3 of my "scroll" gestures are in vain.
Second is that "flinging" motions don't register very well with Firefox. With Chrome, "flinging" sends the web page flying at a predictable speed; with Firefox, it lags for a fraction of a second before scrolling at a random speed which is usually much slower than that in Chrome. It's as if Firefox doesn't register the final thumb flick of a "fling", but Chrome does. Since "flinging" is my primary method of browsing longer web pages, ultimately my thumb has to physically do more work, and gets exhausted more quickly, when using Firefox than Chrome.
A third nitpick is that, while (non-flinging) page scrolling keeps up with my thumb, it does so in a jerky manner, like it can't quite keep up with rendering, or it doesn't see all the touch events. Reminds me of an old PDA. In contrast, scrolling in Chrome is very smooth. This looks ugly but I could live with it.
It is the first to two issues that prevent me from using Firefox on Android for anything but Facebook.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/social-networ...
I find it quite interesting that Android even has all the interfaces and permissions to allow alternative launchers. What a great feature in this generally fairly locked-down space of non-PC OSes.
It's been my second browser for Twitch and Netflix only for a while now. I'm bit even sure how useful that is anymore if I'm honest as I've not tried them in firefox for a while - but they used to be unusable and I've become accustomed to having another browser for them
They have features not in chrome and Visa versa. But to blindly switch means taking a productivity penalty, at least temporarily.
How do FF users do this?
I also wrote this up for the owners to send to their staff, feel free to reuse if appropriate for you:
We’ve seen at least one situation recently where a user “signed in” to Chrome when prompted, which brought that user’s personal bookmarks and website logins onto their work computer. While Chrome offers this as an option, there are no situations where your personal account should be linked to a browser at work – if you need to be using personal email, etc. please do so from your own phone or other device on your own time. This is for your own privacy and security as well as for the practice – we want to not have your personal data on our systems, and you don’t want your private email, bookmarks, etc. accessible to anyone else who happens to be at your desk while you’ve stepped away.
If you have linked your browser to a personal account, please remove that connection using the instructions below.
You can check whether Chrome is linked to an online account by clicking on the small person icon at the top right corner of the window – just to the left of the “X” to close the window. • If you click on that and it asks you to sign in, you’re not linked to an account. • If you click on that and it lists a personal account, click on “Manage People” to open a new window listing connected accounts. On each account there are 3 dots in the top right corner – click those and “Remove this person” • If you see a name rather than a generic person icon, click on that and use “Manage People” to remove that connected account.
Firefox offers a similar but less-used version of this that would have required creating a Firefox account to use Firefox Sync. If you have done this with Firefox please disconnect it; if you’re not sure then you almost certainly haven’t done this in Firefox and don’t need to worry about it.
Of course, if someone is signing into their personal account using work hardware, they're basically saying they trust the company not to do any intrusive monitoring, where "intrusive" is something I'm deliberately leaving a bit vague. The company probably has some idea what sites they visit but employees expect that the company is not stealing their credentials or having someone virtually read over their shoulder without a very good reason. If outside intruders get into work device management servers and such, employees' personal stuff is at risk also, but they're willing to accept this for the sake of convenience.
I have, on my work-owned laptop, both work and personal Chrome profiles. (The analogous Firefox feature is multi-account containers.) I might only bring a work laptop when traveling for work. Most of the time, and certainly if I'm presenting during a meeting, I'm using the work profile. I'll use the other only when I'm alone. I lock my screen when I'm not there; I have sensitive access, so this is expected for reasons other than protecting my personal data.
Conversely, work allows me to access my work email and some other internal sites from my personal phone if I agree to certain device management restrictions. I do this rather than carry two phones. Some people choose otherwise.
Once upon a time that was the case - "Cyber Monday" as a prime case in point. Some limited amount of non-work browsing is generally still fine at most offices I deal with, most notably checking news, weather, sports scores, etc.
However as a person responsible for making sure there are no breaches (particularly reportable ones) at offices, I'm moving more and more to the "No personal use. Period. No debate." position. I can control the kind of filtering, AV checks and attachments that come into the office via the business email as an example, but if people are checking their personal email on company systems I may not be able to catch the "Huh, I don't remember ordering from them, I wonder what this invoice email is all about?" person. Antivirus is all well and good but it's not 100%, and while I can look at the mail filters and see that there were 400 PDFs with variations of "Delivery Notification" or "Invoice 1234567" blocked in the last half hour to a ton of different addresses, Jane Smith in Billing or Accounts Payable may only see one or two - and on a really bad day, opening just one may be all it takes.
Also, these days a huge percentage of people not only have smartphones but use those smartphones as their primary devices for Internet access. 5 years ago that wasn't the case, but now? George with the iPhone 7 Plus can quite easily check his email or do plenty of other things that would have been much less pleasant on an iPhone 4.
Wouldn't Jane Smith from Accounts Payable anyway open a PDF invoice email, regardless of the address?
So the offence was merely having porn bookmarks in their browser - not visiting porn sites at work? Wow.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the person whose account it was didn't even know that bookmarks exist in Chrome - it's not like Google makes it obvious these days. I suspect there were some awkward discussions at home that evening, or possibly on the phone with college-age children.
LOL
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Containers splits them out beautifully, with minimal tracking.
With Chrome / Chromium, Google wants you to log-in using a Google account, so you fall into the trap again.
Google of course has all the information server-side to do this; I'm unsure if they actually use it. There's usually a line on tracking that (you think) a company won't cross; e.g. I wouldn't expect Google to use browser fingerprinting to track you when logged out in a different browser, but I'm not sure about web activity in Chrome. Sounds plausible either way.
My question is independent of container tabs, it's a question of whether we know the level of tracking Google does on a signed-in chrome where your google account is not signed in in the session (is this even possible?)
But personally I certainly don't need to be logged in using any of Googles services except for GMail so I'd rather just not build up the history rather than having to go about deleting it (or not because there's so many other things to get distracted by)
Entire or not, does Google analytics apply here?
I'm happily using DDG as a replacemet for most Google searches. But I guess I need to stop using GMail.
But not at the same time, which is a showstopper to me (still using Firefox Nightly as main browser).
I've been using Firefox this way for over a year, 2 instances open right now.
Compared to ProfileManager, Container Tabs are absolutely awesome. Completely different experience, smooth and nice.
The solution for me was to use one Firefox installation per profile: primary = stable, secondary = nightly.
Container tabs are way nicer than this, but since I open lots of tabs, I still like the distinction between stable and nightly (stable = regular browsing, nightly = FB).
If your use case is not covered, you surely can write a WebExtension to provide the functionality. Containers as well as sync are exposed in the API.
Container settings (names, colors, icons, assignments) should be synced (if not, please file a bug). Open tabs will be synced, not sure how they will open on another machine (considering URL-to-Container assignments should be synced, they should open in the respective containers – maybe there's a possible improvement here).
I expect the different Cookie stores to be synced as well, if not, that's a bug.
Also, changing a container's color does not change the color shown on existing tabs.
It was locking out journalists drafting stories!
How can you trust Google anymore? There's something rotten festering in Mountain View.
Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards as governments? If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it?
Because the "opt-out" process is orders of magnitude easier. You don't have to use Google. Microsoft has online document creation applications, as does Apple, assuming iWork still exists. Or you can just write documents offline using any of several thousand tools.
Corporate censorship is entirely under your control. You can always stop the censorship by simply not saying it using that corporation's tools. Corporations can control how you say something, but not what you say. Governments can control the act of saying it. One is far worse than the other.
Again, by all means, protest Google/Amazon/Facebook. I'd love to see the state of affairs change too. Just don't pretend like missing your church bulletin is equivalent to actual imprisonment.
Everybody understood implicitly that you only put in your own information. Giving away other people's personal information to a some company for which it is clearly valuable is not considered nice. It's simply not yours to give away. For the few who didn't understand this most companies had this in their terms of service anyway, as there could be legal risks involved.
All those companies are gone now. They are out-competed by a select few very large companies who did everything possible to make it very easy for people to input everyone else's contact information in their database, including making that behaviour default in the software that ships with your phone. In the beginning you could ask people nicely not to input all your personal info in third party phone book services. That's not really possible anymore.
The days when you could practically opt out of these companies are long gone.
Easier or more difficult to get by without shouldn't distract us from the core point GP made, that corporate (arbitrary) censorship, with no redress, should be taken as seriously as govt censorship. These days they are just two arms on the same chimera.
The answer is: groups of people (and corporations are groups of people) are free to limit speech according to whatever rules the group decides upon. What you're proposing is that certain large corporations be treated as quasi-governmental entities. Which is a _free-speech restriction_.
Not saying it's a bad idea, necessarily. But I'd rather my freedom to say that certain types of speech are unacceptable was guaranteed.
My point is censorship is a huge responsibility and power, especially when it is done at the scale govts and multi-national corps do, and therefore it needs serious transparency and checks and balances, in both cases.
I don't see this happening to satisfaction. Instances of regrettable censorship stay regrettable, and keep recurring.
I just can't quite go as far as to say that Google or Facebook should be treated as governmental entities. The bill of rights restricts what government can do. It has never been interpreted as restricting what an individual person can do, even if that person heads a giant corporation.
Solve these problems another way, not by literally nationalizing social media.
Because one of these organizations can throw you into a cage to be raped and tortured for the rest of your life, and the other can deny you access to some fairly useful web apps.
There is already a case where private companies can't shut down their service to you as they wish, it's utilities (water, electricity, gas). I hope we can recognize at some point that Internet access should count as a utility too, and some core services like email service too.
Any power that you take away from (comparatively weak, subject to competition) Google by giving it to (already terrifyingly powerful and monopolistic) USG is not a move in the right direction.
There are other email services which offer what people want. Want people are proposing is imposing their will on Google and the people that run it, even though there is competition out there that people could use instead and get what they want. Gmail and Google Apps are far from the only options people have, and far from the only free options people have. But if it is so important that people have an email address, then the USG could actually offer that (I've long thought the USPS should offer verified email addresses with strict spam protection by aggressively pursuing violators). Otherwise, let people pay what they want for the level of assurance they want.
The other side of this argument is that there are some things we do want to enforce companies do, such as offer a base level of health care in a package. I support this as well, because that solves an endemic problem where people have restricted choice and it also hurts society as a whole. That is, I think Hobby Lobby should have to provide birth control in their health plans because of the reasons outlined above, but I don't think any non governmental service provider that isn't a monopoly (and Google isn't a monopoly in cloud apps, even if there is an argument that can be made about them being one in search) should have to adhere to dictates about what what content they must allow on their service. That's a pretty slippery slope in my view.
Because you have choice of what to use. You don't always (or even often) have choice of what country to live in, and there's not a lot of unclaimed land that's hospitable. Some people may want a service they know the operators of will be proactive about keeping certain content off. Others will want a service that makes it their goal to not do that and protect everything on it. Choice is key here, and the government stipulating what needs to be done is actually restrictive, not freeing (you're just imposing your own views on others systematically). When there isn't a choice of what service/product to use, that's when other laws may come into effect. Anti-trust laws.
This sounds like one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" no-win solutions for Google. Users (and Google) don't want Google to allow people to use Google Docs to distribute malware and harvest passwords, they don't want someone at Google to look at their documents to see if they are "safe" (which Google couldn't realistically do even if they wanted to), so then people got upset when the automated software Google uses to look for these problems did a bad job for some people.
While it'd be nice if every system and process worked well 100% of the time and had no bugs, that's just not a realistic expectation.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/31/google-docs-users-locked...
firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &
Create different profiles[2] for each separate browser you need, and then make shortcuts to launch them.[3] Each Firefox profile will work like a completely separate browser.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...
Chrome supports multiple profiles, which may optionally be associated with a Google account. Firefox has the same thing, minus the Google account.
The new panel containers are also handy. They allow you to have shared history and bookmarks but separate cookies and sessions. You can be logged into the same site on different accounts in two tabs in the same window.
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
Middle-clicking or Ctrl+clicking the New Tab button does inherit the current container. It also opens the new tab to the right of the current tab instead of at the far right of the tab strip. These actions are one in the same, so any extension that opens a tab to the right of the current tab (like Always Right or All Tabs Helper) also make the tab inherit the current container.
It's strange that such a useful feature is barely advertised at all in the UI, but it's there.
But your other criticisms of using containers as profiles are spot-on.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Shortcut_to_a_specific_profile
Also don't forget to add -no-remote option to each of the links to enable starting such browsers in parallel. Sadly it's not mentioned behind the URL above.
Firefox needs to improve on Chrome here. The erstwhile "Profile Switcher" addon provided a nice UI but is sadly gone after the WebExtensions transition and I cannot find an equivalent so far.
But containers don't have separate extensions, bookmarks and history so they can't completely replace profiles.
So at least until then, about:profiles is no replacement for using the -P command-line switch to start the profile manager.
Using multiple profiles seamlessly is one area Firefox can and should seriously improve, or Chrome's "User" feature will always have the edge.
Anyone know how to make the windows visually distinct?
Syncing extensions and browsing history is not something I feel I need.
You could always try tweeting him. He's also on HN.
DISCLOSURE: I work for Mozilla, and Pocket in particular.
It's good even for creating fake accounts, test accounts, testing apps from the perspective of different user sessions etc.
Really? I can configure two personas to go through two different proxies? I can disable javascript in one and leave it enabled in the other?
Those are features I need in Containers, but as far as I've been able to read, they aren't present and there are no plans to allow for them.
- Profiles
- Containers
- Persona tabs
?
Don't do that. On one hand you mix work and personal related issues (not recommended) on the other hand it makes it easier to track you (as your accounts can be correlated). As a dev I have my own (personal, work, ...) users/accounts even at home (if I do remote) to separate the stuff - maybe that's paranoid, but for me it was great to improve work-life balance.
about:profiles gives you the same functionality as Chrome's profiles; it's just a bit harder to discover.
Ok, I spend my life filling in captchas, but to me that’s a signal that it is working and Google aren’t overly sure who I am.
One thing they have been doing very well is allowing history to sync between multiple devices on different OSes.
Right now I use Chrome everywhere because :
- It feels pretty fast (I still have to try the new FF)
- Any replacement needs to come with an extension covering this feature and working across all my OSes.
Haven't tried it on iOS yet, but it worked great on my Android.
In order to switch, both FF desktop and mobile need to be better than Chrome.
Does FF support a version of Chrome tabs too ?
Damn, they have built themselves a good moat just with features I will miss.
That's asking a lot (chrome does not do that AFAIK) but that's the only way to allow me to use multiple browsers on different devices fluidly (and also to continue using chrome where it has an edge, like on mobile with chrome tabs)
(I'm the Chrome DevTools tech writer / advocate)
Which brings me to my other point (which I always keep hammering on in browser threads): why don't 3rd-party browser focus more on battery? If you're on Windows, Edge is king in battery use. On macOS, its Safari. On Linux, none (but then Linux doesn't have good power management in general). We live in a mobile-first world these days, why not focus browser development there?
Edit: I'm not dissing the Firefox or Chrome team their efforts, but almost all the news articles or blogs I see speak about Chrome or Firefox getting faster. And they do, by significant jumps. But when there are battery improvements, they are usually pretty middling (say 10-20m more battery life). So all I'm saying: why not flip the focus?
There are reasonable answers -- Safari's extensions aren't quite as capable as the other two, so it's possible you're relying on an extension that Safari doesn't have and can never duplicate, and of course if you need to sync bookmarks and other browser data across OS platforms, Safari falls down in the way all iCloud-backed apps do. But Safari does focus a lot on battery conservation, and if you're on a laptop that can make a big difference. And, while I'm sure there are benchmarks out there to quibble over, in practice Safari seems to be just as fast and just as compliant as Chrome and Firefox are.
I've been using Safari as my main web browser for years without feeling like I'm missing out on either performance or killer features. I keep copies of Firefox and Chrome around and keep them up to date, mostly for web site testing purposes; neither of them have added features compelling enough to make me want to switch back. I doubt Firefox 57 is likely to change that equation, although I'm happy to hear that they've got their groove back, as it were.
I love Firefox, and owning an iMac I'm not terribly concerned about the power efficiency difference between the two - but damn if it isn't convenient to have the ability to just pick up where I left off.
I don't have a laptop, but will when the Qualcomm Snapdragon Windows10 machines land, and will probably use Edge exclusively there.
It's important to watch where incentives run. Google has the incentive to profit from you. Microsoft and Apple have the incentive to make sure your browser and device work as efficiently and well together as possible. Mozilla focuses on privacy as their main feature.
The regular Firefox is much slower than Chrome still. The nightly is now noticeably faster than Chrome.
The current stable release 56 just can't compare to chrome.
Apparently they have decided 57 is stable already but plan to make it official tomorrow.
From my unscientific testing, 57 is only as fast as chrome, while the nightly (59) seems to be faster than chrome. They should have waited until 59 was stable.
I would be using the nightly as my main browser if I didn't have experience with crashes and bugs with nightly versions before.
They keep making it more and more like Chrome. If I wanted to use Chrome, I would. It's gotten to bloat maximum.
It's slow as hell. It's less flexible and less easy to personalize. They have broken some of my favorite add-ons.
This piece is pure propaganda.
It does break some extensions, but many have converted. Which are you having trouble with? The main one I'm missing is "Disable Ctrl+Q".
My notes: https://www.bidon.ca/fr/random/2017-10-05-webextensions-supp...
My main objection is still the sheer size and the amount of memory it takes, and the continual feature creep to make it more and more like Chrome. I know I'm in the minority, and also that it's heresy to say anything bad about Mozilla here. Oh well.
I only wish I had lots of money and/or time so I could help revive the development of xombrero, but at least it's still available.
Other options for Vim-like web extensions are Saka key, Vim-Vixen and Tridactyl.
Even if it's the extension fault, why they aren't sandboxed properly, or even why there eisn't basic reporting about the offenders boggles my mind. Maybe it's because of the API... I find it hard to believe it isn't possible to retrofit some of that on the current design to be honest.
And now, because they couldn't handle it, we're getting extensions with crippled power, that are very (very) far away from feature parity with the old ones.
I wasn't happy before, and I'm not happy now, albeit for different reason.
The fact that I'm using Firefox of course means I'm not thinking too much of other browsers. The fact an extension in chrome can't add a frigging sidebar is a personal pet peeve of mine.
I remember when Firefox was the lightweight alternative to Internet Explorer 6...
I leave Firefox open for months on end without problem and with several hundred of tabs open, multiple windows too. I do use a tab unloader, that unloads an inactive tab after a while. Its precisely because of this that other browsers are not suitable for me
Never had such an issue with Chrome, but man FF57 is my new default. SO FAST. I don't care if I need to restart it this thing is awesome.
I have exactly the same problem as the one you replied to.
It seems like some resources never get cleaned up, so if I in the span of a day open 100 tabs and close them then I will not end up with much higher memory usage than initially.
I have investigated this with about:memory and while not seeing something conclusive I did sometimes see domains taking up memory which were not loaded in any tab (ghost windows) or high amounts of memory used for "media".
I will try disabling the handful of addons I use beside uBlock Origin which is too essential to disable.
That said, I don't know if Quantum fixes the specific memory leaks you have, adds (back?) the extension hooks you miss, or adds the reporting you're looking for.
I found Electrolysis still quite slow. but the new engine ("Quantum"), is ridiculous fast. The last ~5 versions were such big improvements, that I even switched from Chrome. It's so good know that there is no need to keep Chrome. Firefox isn't good enough again, Firefox is the browser again.
So, literally, I still use Chrome (because I'm too used to it), but I do all my dev work on Firefox, which has a dev-friendly user policy.
If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then by using Chrome you're still helping them, even if your Chrome is un-googlified.
This is because you help Chrome become a monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet Explorer already. Many people here probably don't remember, but IExplorer also won on technical merits, version 5 being an excellent browser compared with its competition. Market dominance that allowed Microsoft to screw the web for a decade at least. And no, in this context its open source nature does not matter much for as long as Google controls its implementation and distribution.
Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog.
Now don't get me wrong, it is true that Google and Chrome have helped the open web. But that doesn't matter that much, because they can always turn and you can see how lately Chrome is making bold changes without waiting confirmation from W3C or the other browser vendors — like disabling forms auto-complete or deprecating certificating pining.
They are at a point where Chrome has enough market share to implement whatever the heck they want. DRM? H.264? Lost battles after they ended up in Chrome.
I just love that the web community actually thinks about this, and actively works to avoid monopolization and nonstandard behavior on the different browsers.
Recently, I have moved into desktop development (using Qt and GTK+), and it is atrocious just how difficult it is to deploy a non-trivially sized native application on the three common operating systems. I really wish that the desktop development community could have unified around a similar set of standards for all the OSes when it comes to desktop applications too.
The web application platform is painful in several ways too, but I think they have nailed it with attention to standards compliance and weeding-out monopolistic behavior
Different system libraries, different window management environments and user expectations for layout and interaction, different handling of hi-dpi displays, different filesystems with different filename restrictions and different handling of filename encodings, different application packaging, different code signing and sandboxing requirements, different package distribution mechanisms. I've probably missed a few, but those cover some memorable enough annoyances for me in recent years.
I don't enjoy web development, but I do enjoy web publication and distribution.
I really like the built in free VPN that Opera provides.
Where do you see the search bar being removed? I can't see any announcements, I don't think it's going away. Also, I don't think the combined bar is missing functionalities, at least not the one you're describing.
On Firefox Developer Edition 58, in the menu you can choose between :
Use the address bar for search and navigation
or
Add search bar in toolbar
This decides between combining the address bar and search bar into one, or having a separate address bar and search bar. You can also pick a keyword for each search engine.
Even if you decide to use the combined bar, I just tried adding "+ddg" keyword[1] on Duck Duck Go and type "+ddg test" and it searched for "test" on Duck Duck Go instead of my default search engine.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
I don't remember Google ever warning me specifically that this was happening in the background, and after I checked https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and noticed it was doing that, I was so furious that I deleted all the data Google kept on me there, and paused all tracking in the Activity Controls page. I also stopped signing in to the Google account in Chrome.
This is why I'm a big supporter of EU's "explicit consent" idea. I should be knowing stuff like that without having to read a 5-page privacy policy that's often hidden somewhere on the Help page.
Speaking of Firefox, version 57 also makes it easier to enable Tracking Protection in settings now (before you had to switch to the private windows to benefit from it, although you could make it so that FF always opened private windows by default).
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/07/firefox-57-full-tracking-p...
You can download FF57 from their FTP servers (they published it today), if you can't wait for the auto-update tomorrow:
Firefox is more secure than Chrome, but it's not very secure. The sad thing is that it used to be more secure and Mozilla deliberately weakened their security.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that we should be careful about saving passwords in Firefox if we could be the target of a National Security Letter from the US. The attack would be detectable, so it cannot be used very often (and they would need a really good excuse for doing so).
By contrast, Google takes all our data and can do whatever they want with it, without a warrant/NSL?
I have no idea why so many downvotes. Can anyone disagree that a system in which Mozilla is able to decrypt user data is insecure?
One note: the attack is not necessarily detectable, unless you are in the practice of verifying the JavaScript you receive for each page. If there were some public registry of hashed versions of Mozilla-served JavaScript, it would be detectable.
Also, you need not worry only about the U.S. government, but also about any government which can compel Mozilla to act, and any government which can compel an employee of Mozilla to act, and finally any employees at Mozilla with access. And also you need to worry about bugs in Mozilla's JavaScript: since they did not design a system in which they can't know your password (which is the key to all your secrets), an implementation error might send them your password (and thus allow them to decrypt all your secrets).
People get annoyed of being told x-y-z is not secure, while not being offered any practical solution, especially if the risk/probability of attack is low.
(I'm assuming Firefox has a good reason for working the way it does, but I guess the first step would be to have more documentation about that.)
Which can themselves be compromised. The old Firefox Sync protocol was immune to remote compromise, completely and totally.
> People get annoyed of being told x-y-z is not secure, while not being offered any practical solution
I agree: the problem is that there was a practical solution: just keep the old Sync protocol.
> I'm assuming Firefox has a good reason for working the way it does
The short version is that people wanted to be able to only have one device and still get at their data, and Mozilla didn't want to confuse them by separating their account passwords and their sync passwords. Never mind that combining them has results in a wholesale loss of security.
but i think i'll stick with 56 as my default browser for a little longer since quantum breaks some great legacy add-ons:
* NoScript -- control script execution
* RequestPolicy (and its variants) -- control content requests
* Blend In -- use the most common user agent string
It won't be quite full-featured yet, though. He's planning that for Firefox 59, which will be the next Extended Support Release and what Tor Browser will be based on (which needs NoScript).
There's a handful of compatible user-agent switchers already...
It'll set the user agent to the same as the Tor browser, Firefox 52.
I suppose it has benefit now with Android, and multiple devices, but Google, and Youtube both started saving searches long before the release of Chrome.
Quite terrible.
If you are logged in you Google account, every Google search will end up in your Google history. It doesn't matter if you search from Chrome's omnibox, google.com or Firefox's search bar.
Does Chrome also uploads search made with other search engines? That would be a bit more worrisome. Though considering that Firefox saves your history in your "Firefox Sync" account, I wouldn't be surprised if Google did the same.
Chrome is specifically designed to do the opposite: Google explicitly states that when you sign into Chrome, "your experience in other Google products is personalized by including your Chrome history with your Web & App Activity." (https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277)
And interestingly, you could have a page showing your search history with Firefox sync just like with Google. Just because a page shows you private data doesn't mean someone else has access to it, and the more common opposite is also true.
(Note, that while the password and key derived from it never normally leave the brwser, the login page is served from the network. So, you trust Mozilla's servers to not get hacked and serve you insecure login page.)
The system also has a notion of "class A" storage, where Mozilla knows the key (called kA), but AFAIK nothing ever used that. Maybe its already gone.
Oh, the device names (and types - like desktop vs android) are not encrypted. Probably because of attempts to add push updates (normally, sync is just polling for updates). And the profile data too (not a part of Sync at all - its Accounts).
Google has optional client-side (also, E2E) encryption, for some types of the data (e.g. passwords and autofill data). One has to opt in explicitly. When opted in, data is encrypted with a key that's is derived form a passphrase you provide (and sync implementations would error and ask you for the passphrase). I'm not sure, but IIRC protocol has provisions that allow to not encrypt some data at client's (= Chrome's) discretion, as the encrypted flag is set per-object. I'm not aware if this is used or not - was a very long while since I've looked at their sync server implementation.
That said, for E2E encryption both system have feature parity, but Mozilla's one has it by design and Google's one only as an opt-in.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?p=web_app_...
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277
"When you sign in to Chrome, your info is saved to your Google Account so you can get it whenever you need it."
It is literally the first sentence. I also support some of the various EU privacy initiatives but I don't support them because I think users should be militantly ignorant about what they're doing.
Please let me increase "content process count" higher than 7. Chrome opens hundreds of child-processes (no problem at all on my PC).
And I am still keeping an older Firefox 48 around, as it's the last version that runs Firebug and other good but now unsupported addons. Firebug had this "DOM" panel which showed the non-default DOM attributes in a different color and showed them as first few entries, and the rest below. The DevTools in new Firefox has a less useful DOM panel (it shows all attributes not grouped or colored differently, makes the DOM panel useless and chaotic) - please improve the DOM panel to be feature-equalent to the old Firebug DOM panel!!
I remember the early browsers as smaller programs that were oriented around retrieving content for further viewing/interaction using other applications. As I understood it, this was one of the ways that MIME was useful.
The problems with "modern" web browsing that annoy users probably have less to do with what, back then, would have been separate programs. They have more to do with the retrieval step. User have little control over 1. the content the browser requests and retrieves and 2. whether and how that content is processed (i.e. the "default settings" of the browser decide and to my knowledge few users today manually adjust MIME settings or whatever today's equivalent is). Because users today expect the browser to do everything. It is more than a user agent i.e. http client, it is an "all-in-one" program that can seemingly do anything. No auxiliary programs are needed. This comes at a cost. I would argue that cost includes many hassles that users experience, including "speed".
The point is that this blog post is talking about #2, the processing of retrieved content. But is that really what causes most of the user annoyances? Is that what ultimately affects "speed"?
Or could it be, at least in part, that some web page is controlling the web browser to have it make dozens upon dozens of DNS and HTTP requests, not only for tracking, but in some cases for "content" the user does not want.
The first task of the user agent, #1, to retrieve content, is not nearly as complex as the second, #2. It probably has not changed much since the early days of the www. (I still use original netcat from 1996 as well as other 1990's tcp clients to great effect.) Retrieval of content can be user controlled. The complexity is manageable. The "user agent" can be small, open source and easily compiled by the user. And with todays memory and networking retrieval can be very fast.
When I think of a "user agent" I think of a tcp or http client, a small program that can make TCP connections and HTTP requests, not one that is also a graphics rendering engine, a video player, a programming language interpreter or a PDF viewer, etc.
It is the disappearance of the MIME idea in favor of a highly complex, all-in-one application called a "modern web browser" that is at the source of every known problem I can think of that is associated with "modern web browsers" today, whether it is browser "speed" or privacy or security or whatever. It is the price one must pay for not having separate programs with separate privileges to accomplish separate tasks.
IMO the problem is not the kitchen sink nature of web browsers, the problem is the kitchen sink nature of the web itself. It needs to be split into functionally separate parts that can be interfaced with different programs and workflows, instead of being a huge, integrated 'web' that is in turn parsed by a similarly huge, integrated program, the browser.
Here's something I find curious.
When Apple does it, it's because they want to kill the open web and drive more people to their closed Apple News platform. When Mozilla does it, it's because they're saints.
How am I able to reconcile these two?
It's like reviews on Amazon. You skim the highs and the lows and you read the rest. People who say Apple is killing the open web are at the extreme. Skim what they say just to be familiar with their argument, but be careful not to get sucked in.
My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers). That's something that's just not in Google's interest to put in Chrome.
Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of users. Becoming true "User Agents," in other words. See also Safari iOS allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some popular tracking behaviors by default. It's absolutely great. And it's not surprising to me that Chrome is not a leader here. It's owned by the biggest advertising company on the internet. I predict Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy, anti-nag features.