I've pretty much made the same changes. I was luke-warm on the switch from chrome to Firefox until I started using containers and CookieAutoDelete with those containers. I have a 'Google' container that preserves google cookies for when I log into gmail (transition in progress)- but otherwise google cookies get automatically deleted. There are a handful of other sites I wish to stay logged into - like github, slack, spotify - and I have containers for them with CookieAutoDelete configured accordingly. Its also comes in handy for sites where I have a work account and a personal account - like AWS. Instead of having to open an incognito window to allow being signed into two accounts at the same time, I just have separate containers. Makes a lot of practical sense for me.

I also made the switch to Bitwarden - except for me I was using Lastpass before. Bitwarden has a much cleaner interface and a sane sharing scheme. Trying to keep shared passwords in sync with my wife in Lastpass was an absolute nightmare - to the point that I hated changing the passwords - which is one of the major points of a password manager. Lastpass has become stagnant and bloated since LogMeIn bought it.

You like the "Temporary Containers" extension. It automatically creates a new container for every site that doesn't already have an assigned container. The temporary container (cookies, etc) get deleted 30 minutes after you close the last tab for the container's site.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I use Sandboxie with a browser instance without cookies or cache. It automatically deletes files after closure. Only the browser is allowed internet access.

For specific services like my primary email, I have an isolated Firefox instance keep the cookies for that service only. I don't use that instance for anything but that service. Is there anything I'm giving them (besides what information you give by using the service at all of course)in keeping the cookie? Just want to be aware of any risk I may have overlooked.

I just found my new fave FF extension. Thank you for sharing this!

Was similarly lukewarm to the change. I actually only made the change because I was having resource issues with chrome and bookmark interactions would lock the screen for a few hundred milliseconds - tried everything. Eventually you just blame the vendor and switch.

But now, well, I don't really see me going back any time soon.

So Bitwarden is basically Lastpass except you can also host it yourself?

You can host it yourself - I don't. The interface is much cleaner and easier to use IMHO, especially if you use password sharing. At the end of the day its a password manager, and there are plenty to choose from. I used to be a big Lastpass fan - but their quality has continued to degrade and competitors have stepped up their game. If I didn't end up using Bitwarden, I probably would have ended up with 1Password.

Yea but you don't have to. I don't have a lot of experience with 1pass/last pass but I assume they're the same. I liked that Bitwarden was free, that I could do my own server, and that I can do dual account sharing via org setup - all free accounts.

What are you going to transition to from Gmail?

Not the original poster, but I would recommend to anybody that they move to Fastmail.

My only concern with Fastmail is they're Australia-based and the government there seems rather hostile to privacy.

This is exactly why the new encryption laws are so detrimental to the Aussie tech industry.

I've been on Fastmail for just over a year and it's been very reliable and effective.

another vote for Fastmail from me

I'd be careful with that one, due to recent developments in Australia, more or less banning encryption (and legalising subverting employees of companies without the company's knowledge, to break their encryption schemes secretly). Until we know more, not a single Australian product can be trusted and even Australian employees of companies working overseas can't be trusted anymore. It's horrific.

what about protonmail?

I have a protonmail premium account and I'm disappointed. First you can't use a native client in linux because the bridge isn't released yet (in the faq it's written it's planned to be released early 2018 lol). The android client doesn't like the fact that I desactived the google play service on my phone (how can a privacy focused email depends of the google play service? ). They hooked me up because they said that they where going to open sourcing protonmail, but for the moment neither the bridge nor the android/ios client are open source.

I unfortunately have to second this.

The bridge solution is a nice attempt at supporting open standards, but it's not on Linux or Android which basically means my email is silo-ed. I can't use it with my regular mail client and the ProtonMail client will never be all things to everybody.

The android client at least does seem to run just fine without Play Services, it just pops up annoying notifications saying it needs them.

At this stage I'm probably looking at migrating away.

I'd really like a mail provider that lets me forward a few addresses to the rest of my family since I own lastname.nz, but that doesn't seem possible on most mail hosts without a full x-user enterprise setup.

Protonmail limits the number of domains you can use. Fastmail has a much higher limit.

I'm currently giving ProtonMail a try - but I'm also using a custom domain. My current thoughts are that I'll switch everything over to my custom domain, and then I'll never be locked into an email provider again. If ProtonMail doesn't pan out, I'll switch to someone else - still keeping my custom domain. My reliance on google and my attempts to move out of it has really been an eye opening experience I hope to not repeat.

I went with Tutanota.com which on top of active development also communicates regularly with its users on what features are being worked on. Plus they allow you to have/create a bunch of different email addresses under the same mailbox.

Last I checked, containers weren't working properly, and I gave up on the idea because false sense of security is worse. My test website was web.whatsapp.com. I think this is the tracker, although I didn't really look too much into it (https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/8...

Edit: fixed link

Have you tried that again since September 2017? I can’t seem to reproduce the issue on my machine. (By the way, the link includes an extra underscore. The correct one is https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/8... )

Yes, I can still reproduce it on 64. I'm on linux though.

Pretty sure I figured this out, since I was able to reproduce it as well. It has to do with caching and something Whatsapp is doing to restore the page from local data most likely, as once you clear the local data for web.whatsapp.com, it correctly requests redirecting to the correct container.

If I had to guess, I suspect that Firefox triggers the container switch dialog on the first network request, and that page is so optimized that after the first visit it loads entirely from cache and/or localstorage data without any network activity at all.

If true, it might be that while it didn't switch, it actually wasn't leaking data between containers at all, since there was no network activity. I'm not sure if a background request would have triggered a container switch dialog, been blocked quietly, or have been allowed through some root page permissions cascade.

I may be far off, and this is trivially checkable, but I'm out of time.

I had a look at the github issue, and what worked was this comment: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/8...

You can try this if it affects you.

On Linux, works for me. Using add-on version if that helps. There is a bug that opening a url via e.g. xdg isn't able to prevent default tab opening on first startup.

Im also suprised by the firefox performance on android. Ive noticed it can render pages chrome cannot, which is so suprising considering googles investment in progressive web apps and how some of their new android go apps use chrome to render.

+1 for Bitwarden - it's been fun to watch that product unfold.

I’ve wanted to try BitWarden, but haven’t because I couldn’t find a way to use it as a standalone app without creating an account on its site or without having to self-host it. I prefer a solution that allows me to choose where to sync the password database.

Just run a bitwarden server locally, that's what I do.

Especially easy with bitwarden-rs or bitwarden-go (written in rust and go accordingly) instead of having to pull down the bitwarden blessed MS SQL stuff.

keepass?

I made another attempt to switch from Chrome to Firefox only now, like I've been doing every year or so for several years now. Sort of a tradition.

This time it was the extensions that didn't cut it. One of the first things I do (after importing the bookmarks) is to install the same extensions, or find their equivalents.

I heavily use customized mouse gestures. The extension I use on Chrome works like a charm. On Firefox, I tried five in a row.

They would either be very poor in terms of options and customizability, or request 10+ bizarre permissions (which really have nothing to do with functionality I expect from them - such as "read the text of all open tabs", or "monitor extension usage"), or very cumbersome to customize. I've really got fed up after trying out several in a row.

Well - I'll wait another year.

It might be worth contacting the author of the Chrome extension and asking them if they'd be interested in porting; since Firefox's WebExtensions API is a superset of the Chrome extension API, it should hopefully not require too much effort.

There's also an extension called "chrome store firefoxified" that lets you install chrome extensions in firefox. Might be worth a try.

> I made another attempt to switch from Chrome to Firefox only now, like I've been doing every year or so for several years now. Sort of a tradition.

Same here! (except i'm using Brave instead of Chrome, it's also Chromium based and supports its extensions, without the Google tracking features.)

I don't understand why after so many years Firefox still doesn't support "pinch to zoom" on Macbooks/Laptops. For me it's such a basic feature, almost like a car without a proper steering wheel... not very smart if you want to attract more users.

At last, someone created an extension ("Multi-touch Zoom" https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom ), but unfortunately, it often doesn't work properly, like for example on this website...

On all my Linux systems (NixOS), Firefox lags/skips while scrolling all the time. It's a deal breaker for me so I use Chromium, which scrolls without lagging. I read it is because Firefox does not use HW graphics acceleration on Linux, in general. This is both on a computer with the NVidia driver and one with the open-source radeon driver.

Hardware acceleration is disabled by default because many graphics drivers suck and will break the browser if hardware acceleration is turned on. You can just go into the settings and turn it on (and then off, if you have problems).

Chromium disables hardware acceleration by default for a wide swatch of graphics drivers too (including all Nvidia GPUs).

On my current Linux system with NVidia drivers, HW acceleration is enabled according to chrome://gpu (there are many accelerations and some are disabled, but many are enabled including Canvas and Compositing). Regardless of all, Chromium works just great, including smooth scrolling and WebGL, and Firefox doesn't (laggy scrolling, slower WebGL than in Chromium). I don't think the problem is with drivers but with Firefox.

> Chromium disables hardware acceleration by default for a wide swatch of graphics drivers too (including all Nvidia GPUs).

From what I remember reading, it disables it for nouveau driver, not the NVidia driver which works. This is supported by the fact my Chromium is currently using HW accel on NVidia without me having forced anything.

I did try enabling HW accel in Firefox and it did not solve laggy scrolling. I don't think it even really got enabled, I think it's forcibly disabled even if you try to override it.

you're correct, it's definitely just nouveau that's blacklisted, not the proprietary nvidia driver.

Chromium also has hw accel enabled by default for intel drivers, which is by far the most used gpu driver on linux (and is pretty stable in my experience). Firefox doesn't even have it enabled for intel

Firefox has an option to uncheck Smooth Scrolling. So if you press the spacebar, the page instantly jumps down instead of showing the page quickly scroll. I don't know if this would help.

This is the exact reason I have not been able to switch back to FF, but on Windows. Enabling HW acceleration did not fix it.

I'm using FF on AMD and Intel GPUs, and works smooth

I hadn't heard about Bitwarden. Looks like it requires 2-4GB of RAM and a x86 CPU to run your own server due to relying on MS SQL server. Bummer!

There's an unofficial rust implementation[0] that runs in a docker image and uses sqlite for persistence. I don't know what the details are for storing data at-rest in the sqlite db, but it's supposed to be much better on system resources.

0: https://github.com/dani-garcia/bitwarden_rs

Thanks!

The 2-4GB RAM isn’t a hard requirement in my experience. I initially had the whole Docker compose stack running on a single $5 DigitalOcean droplet, and didn’t experience any issues for personal usage. Since they also distribute it to you as Docker containers, you can also set resource limits, specifically for the MSSQL container, to prevent it from hogging all the RAM.

I currently have my Bitwarden instance hosted on my Docker swarm cluster, which is just 3 $5 DO droplets and 1 with like 2GB and RAM and 2vCPUs. But, a quick look shows that currently all the BW containers are running on the $5 ones. I have the MSSQL container’s RAM limited to 1GB as well.

As for the x86 requirement, that’s likely the case, I’m assuming you mentioned it because you’d like to run it on some ARM device like a RPi. I haven’t tried running their containers on an ARM device so I can’t say they’ll be compatible, but I know docker’s ARM compatibility has improved so maybe someone has got them running on some ARM device.

I've been pretty happy with https://www.passwordstore.org/ Keeps passwords encrypted in git, and there's plugins and open source apps for just about everything. Throw your store in a private repo somewhere and you're good to go, no need to worry about Bitwarden or Lastpass or anyone else going out of business.

If you aren't hitting it hard (hosting more than a few connections) you won't notice much limiting to 1GB RAM... I run a couple projects with MS-SQL docker containers and 1GB limit...

    docker run -m 1GB --restart unless-stopped --name sql -h sql -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" -e "MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD=Let-Me-In" -p 1433:1433 -d microsoft/mssql-server-linux:2017-latest

I tend to change the name and port mapping as necessary depending on use, but that's the quickest way to get a server up for MS-SQL... can use SQL Server Management Studio (windows) or Azure Data Studio [1][ (electron, formerly SQL Operations Studio) which is cross platform[2].

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/azuredatastudio [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/azuredatastudio/releases

You can run the Bitwarden Rust implementation on a Raspberry Pi with resources to spare.

The requirement is 2GB. Where do you see 4GB?

Can you expand on how you set up the profile + containers + vpn and how that works for you?

Think he means this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

At least that's for controlling them easily. I use it for Whatsapp web on 2 accounts

Yup that's for containers. It looks like development sorta died on it but I think they will circle back once infrastructure work has been done for sync.

For proxies you can use whatever vpn service or plugin[1]. I use paid Nord because I need consistent access to certain countries for testing. There is some tunnel bear/Nord like plugins that have lists of free proxies.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxy-switche...

Profile manager info:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

See other comment for container/proxy info.

> Passwords managed by bitwarden

Is there a specific reason you don't use Firefox' password manager? (Read: Do I have reason to migrate out of it?)

It's obvious browser password managers are broken in a way it never locks its database, so anyone with physical access can log in to all the site you have passwords for, which also means changing password is easy as logging into your gmail also requires no knowledge.

To this day I can't believe none of the browsers actually try to fix this by at least locking the password database after a certain period like any password managers do. Safari at least disallows you from looking at the list of sites you have passwords for by requiring you to enter your account password but never asks you anything at each site's login.

For this reason, I never use browser based password managers.

You can protect your password DB with a master password on Firefox, though it only will be 'locked' when you close the program. AFAIK this is not too dissimilar from the model for most password managers.

If there was an option to import chrome passwords into Firefox I couldn't find it.

> Read: Do I have reason to migrate out of it?

No, but I suggest you try it out for a day or two, see what you think.

Doesn't Firefox give you the option of importing everything (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) from another browser the first time you fire it up?

IIRC, it also does this the first time you launch it under a new profile.

To log into mobile apps, for Wifi passwords, file passwords, etc.

How "safe" and separated are profiles?

For example, suppose I had a "Casual Browsing" profile and a "Banking" profile.

Could I have both profiles running at the same time and not risk any contamination?

If I were to pick up something bad in one profile, could it leak over to the other?

Unless 65 is faster it's not worth it to me... I work very fast, like Chrome, like other apps on my OS, and there's no excuse for Firefox to run slow like it does on my Windows and Mac still.

Are profiles something available on vanilla Firefox (no extensions)? Thanks!

You can open about:profiles and use it to manage/start them, I think

Yes but it's clunky compared to chrome.

Manager:

firefox -p

Ordirect access:

firefox -p "account name"

I believe containers are available without an add-on using aboutconfig but that may have changed or it may not be full functionality.

And yet Firefox still doesn't have pull to refresh. How can they not support such a basic feature?

I don't particularly care for pull to refresh, given how frequently I refresh without meaning to because of it, but I do wish I didn't have to open the dropdown menu to get a refresh button to refresh the page.

Firefox is faster than Chrome on Android? For me, even scrolling HN (i.e. no JS at all) was jittery and laggy.

I think you're both right. On my Essential Phone (Snapdragon 835 running stock Android 9) pages tend to _render_ quicker in FF, but scrolling, pinch to zoom etc. is smoother in Chrome.

I also find that Firefox will bog down after a month and I have to manually delete out its cache in app settings. I haven't had to do this for Chrome since back in the Android 5.x era.

The latter might also be due to extensions

I could see that.

Not the issue in my case though.. I don't use any extensions on my mobile browsers.

Heh, maybe it's the opposite then! Like an accumulation of shitty trackers, because you don't use uBlock or privacy badger or the like. That would be pretty ironic

Trackers do not really accumulate though, no? Or can they install something persistent (web workers maybe?)

Store stuff in IndexedDB?

Scrolling in Firefox on Android is smoother, ie. more consistent 60fps, than Chrome for me for a few months now. It used to be very bad but suddenly improved dramatically.

Huh, your right. Scrolling in Firefox on Android was awful for years, and was the main reason i stuck with chrome. I'll have to give it a proper go now...

In my experience the minimum hardware baseline for Firefox is higher than Chrome but the optimal hardware baseline is lower.

I switched to Firefox on Android a few years ago and it was unpleasant until I upgrade my phone. At the time I was running a Nexus 4 and moved to a Nextbit Robin.

My partner switched to Firefox on a Google Pixel and regularly complains about issues with it's performance which makes me wonder if Google has done some optimizations to Chrome on the Pixel.

I feel like it has gotten a bit better with this update. Or, at least the release notes mention better scrolling performance and I'm imaging it.

If you really think Firefox is faster on Android, that you have not tried the optimized Kiwi Browser. Try it, and report back how much faster kiwi is compared to Firefox hehe

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...