Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by fencepost on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @10:28PM (#17361609)

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open in Chrome, but otherwise only use it when something just won't work in my locked-down Firefox.

I also can't recommend highly enough Firefox on Android, particularly with uBlock Origin and the "Dark Background and Light Text" addon (currently at version 0.6.8 for ease of finding). For HN you'll want to use the "Simple CSS" dark setting instead of the default - that keeps the arrows, but you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments.

Edit: I also think it's interesting how much Chrome now minimizes and almost hides the Chrome App Store to add new extensions. It's almost as if it's not making Google any money and people keep installing adblockers through it.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by mxvzr on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @11:14PM (#17361815)

I'd remove Ghostery. Not only is it useless once you are running uMatrix & uBlock Origin, they also used to sells your data (page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics) if you activated a feature called "GhostRank". Not sure whether it's still true or not.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by miqkt on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @11:23PM (#17361857)

Ghostery also had an incident [1] last month where they exposed e-mail addresses of some users, which I guess adds further doubt to their reliability.

[1]: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-i...

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by black_puppydog on Thursday June 21, 2018 @03:37AM (#17362926)

wait, why do they need users' emails?

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by tinus_hn on Thursday June 21, 2018 @04:38AM (#17363206)

If you want, you can create an account to ‘sync your ghostery settings’. The username of the account is your email address.

The exposure happened because they sent a mail with a lot of people in the CC: field. Amateurish but it happens. The irony is that the mail was to inform you of the privacy changes due to GDPR.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by Cthulhu_ on Thursday June 21, 2018 @04:10AM (#17363062)

They don't, that's the thing; they wanted to monetize their service, and selling e-mail addresses and user data is one way to do that.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by fencepost on Thursday June 21, 2018 @03:37AM (#17362924)

Ghostery is convenient in that it categorizes what it's blocking - most of the time it's obvious, particularly with uBlock Origin in Advanced mode, but sometimes I'll look at things in uMatrix and say "OK, X is blocked, but why was it on the page and will unblocking it resolve things?" For example, looking at jumpcloud.com Ghostery breaks the 7 blocked items into 2 advertising trackers, 2 "Essential" trackers, 2 analytics trackers and 1 social media tracker.

As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by alien1993 on Thursday June 21, 2018 @04:27AM (#17363152)

> As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.

For now, sooner or later it's going to be mandatory for sure.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by rubenbe on Thursday June 21, 2018 @01:45AM (#17362441)

Indeed, and I personally replaced it with the EFF privacy badger plugin.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by modzu on Thursday June 21, 2018 @12:11AM (#17362092)

+1 for ff on android (because it can run extensions)

recommend checking out 'night light mode' for night browsing -- it does some things a little nicer like dims images and uses low contrast (full disclosure: i am the author. feedback welcome!)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/night-light-m...

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by aembleton on Thursday June 21, 2018 @08:43AM (#17364542)

When I go to https://rideways.com/ it inverts the large background image

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by modzu on Thursday June 21, 2018 @12:21PM (#17366514)

thanks for the report! a fix is forthcoming (looks like some kind of css preloading is tripping up the plugin)

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by chme on Thursday June 21, 2018 @03:50AM (#17362972)

I really love addons like 'Dark Background and Light Text', but they don't work with the 'New Tab', 'about:*' and addons.mozilla.org pages like most other addons in recent Firefox.

For the 'New Tab' page I now use 'New Tab Tools' to set the background to black. But I am still unhappy that its not possible to set all other pages to a dark theme.

Also that Vimium doesn't work with those pages is a shame as well. I hope Mozilla fixes that regression soon. Web Extensions should have the same abilities as the XUL extensions.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by myfonj on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:53AM (#17364239)

You can still tweak Firefox internals but you have to resort to its native `userChrome.css` [0] since current extensions API does not allow access to every corner. Luckily you can use devtools for that [1] what makes it quite pleasant (at least you don't have to restart browser to see the change). You can use pre-made package ([2][3]) and toggle what you want.

[0] https://www.userchrome.org/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial... [2] https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/ [3] https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by unexistance on Friday June 22, 2018 @01:08AM (#17371495)

there's an extreme method of doing 'light text on dark background', like my guide below

http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize....

in which all background & foreground color are of your choice. been using it for 5 years at least

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by chme on Friday June 22, 2018 @03:09AM (#17372022)

Thanks, but I do like it to be easily switchable. Some pages expect certain background colors and changing them makes embedded svgs hard or impossible to see.

Maybe you can get away with using the solarized theme, but I prefer having a black background...

Thanks for this suggestions anyway

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by unexistance on Monday June 25, 2018 @08:44PM (#17397102)

You can change the universal background color to anything :D that is just a guide

heck, I'm using a black background nowadays, trying to mimic blackboard color ha

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by mikedilger on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @11:18PM (#17361827)

Is there a reason to use both uBlock Origin and uMatrix? I thought uMatrix was a more explicit version of the same functionality as uBlock Origin (and written by the same guy).

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by mikedilger on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @11:43PM (#17361957)

I dug into this myself just now. At it's core, uMatrix is "default deny" so it doesn't need all the blacklists. But there are things that uBlock Origin provides that uMatrix does not perhaps including cosmetic filtering, popup blocker, zapper/picker element, etc. The author Raymond Hill (gorhill) has switched back to uMatrix himself and dedicates more development efforts to it now.

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/support-umatrix/5131/179

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by drewmol on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @11:52PM (#17362010)

I use them together, uMatrix as a fine grained control tool where I can setup a saved profile and click-allow until functionality & appearance are acceptable to me, and for 'one-off' or 'fuck-it no time' situations I just toggle uMatrix off. It is very rare I have to turn off uBlock Origin as well (the nuclear option). This leaves me four-five quick clicks away from the median or average user experience.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by chopin on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:15AM (#17363935)

uBlock Origin offers part of the uMatrix functionality as well in the "advanced user" mode.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by beagle3 on Thursday June 21, 2018 @02:08AM (#17362543)

Yes.

Other than the issue of cosmetic filters (which I don't personally use), the main difference is that for uBlock you can subscribe to really good lists, collected and curated by a lot of people - so it is "defauly allow, except for these...", whereas uMatrix is "default deny, except for what you explicitly allowed".

I run both, occasionally have to allow something in uMatrix, never have to turn uBlock off.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by nikbackm on Thursday June 21, 2018 @02:19AM (#17362582)

You can configure uBlock to use default deny as well by changing the mode [1].

It's not as fine-grained as uMatrix but works similarly.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by beagle3 on Thursday June 21, 2018 @02:23AM (#17362598)

Upvoted for the info, but I'll restate why I use both:

uBlock is my blacklist. uMatix is my whitelist. For various reasons, I occasionally need to skip the whitelist, but I never had a reason to turn off the blacklist in a few years of using uBlock.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by simcop2387 on Thursday June 21, 2018 @12:26AM (#17362160)

They can do similar things, uBlock Origin is setup to block ads and other elements on the page (depending on the lists you subscribe to). But uMatrix is more like Noscript, it's blocking the loading of resources from the web. So you can block javascript from some domains, while allowing images or video, etc. I use both so i can block a lot of third party scripts even without them being ads (so most tracking scripts and such).

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by zamalek on Thursday June 21, 2018 @12:31AM (#17362176)

> Firefox is my "daily driver"

I only have FF Developer Edition (IE and Edge, blegh) installed on my host. The only time I open Chrome or otherwise is inside a VM. If a website doesn't work I just close the tab. That is assuming that ever happens; off the top of my head this hasn't happened since the Quantum beta launched.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by bambataa on Thursday June 21, 2018 @05:33AM (#17363453)

Even with Quantum I still find Firefox is almost unusably slow on some pages. It also causes very spikey resource usage. I’d like to use it exclusively but sometimes when I want to cool down my laptop I just switch to Chrome. This is on a Retina MacBook.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by AsyncAwait on Thursday June 21, 2018 @06:03AM (#17363577)

This is macOS-specific, I had noticed it there too, but not on Linux.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by callahad on Thursday June 21, 2018 @08:48AM (#17364573)

Have you tried setting the screen scaling back to the default, or using Firefox Nightly? I believe we recently resolved a bug around that, though I could be mis-remembering.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by piyush_soni on Thursday June 21, 2018 @06:20AM (#17363642)

That will happen a lot with Google's own pages ;).

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by tannhaeuser on Thursday June 21, 2018 @01:36AM (#17362405)

I second this. I've been using FF with uBlock origin on the desktop and on Android for years now. I'm using fairly demanding and rapidly changing web apps for my customer's cloud stuff, and FF runs it flawlessly where it would have memory-leaks etc just three years ago.

The only complaint I've had was with dog-slow SVG animations a couple years ago (for a simplistic game programming project with the kids), but I believe that has since long improved as well.

I hope we can keep the level of relatively mature support for Web standards accross browsers as it is, rather than make the Web more complex all the time.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by tabs_masterrace on Thursday June 21, 2018 @04:10AM (#17363063)

Also very simple but highly useful Extension: Cookie AutoDelete

Deletes cookies & local storage after you leave a website. You can whitelist a few domains like Github etc. for convenience. The only downside is you'll get "privacy reminder / cookie accept" popups every time anew.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by irrenhaus on Thursday June 21, 2018 @06:31AM (#17363700)

Actually I would really like to use FF again. But each and every time I try it I'm impressed with the desktop version, install the Android version and instantly am driven away from FF.

Not only that FF on Android is awfully slow for me. But they also refuse to support either Android accessability services or the new auto completion services which makes them basically totally useless if you want to use a password manager on Android.

This one thing (and the performance, but that I could ignore) is what totally prevents me from using FF.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by qazwse_ on Thursday June 21, 2018 @09:27AM (#17364863)

Depending on what password manager you use, you can try getting the Firefox extension for it. I use Bitwarden, and their extension just works. Although I agree with you that they should have support for it through the accessibility/auto-completion services. The ability to have uBlock in a mobile browser is too convenient to give up.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by atrotors on Thursday June 21, 2018 @04:56AM (#17363301)

I recommend removing Ghostery. They sell aggregated data or something.

EFF makes an extension called privacy badger. It learns which websites are tracking you automatically. and blocks them or their cookies.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by oselhn on Thursday June 21, 2018 @02:38AM (#17362666)

Ghostery like filtering is already implemented in firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection).

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by hateful on Thursday June 21, 2018 @10:41AM (#17365577)

Thanks for pointing me towards "Dark Background and Light Text". Having a dark background and light text is something that's very important to me.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by lloda on Thursday June 21, 2018 @02:21AM (#17362590)

> you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments

sounds like a win, honestly.

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