> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser
Are you reporting these to the webcompat project? Mozilla is absolutely funding QA testers and engineers to check what's broken and triage issues that affect specific browsers and not others.
They've handled 103k issues: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
A great number of the issues that Mozilla contractors and employees investigate that are reported via the webcompat project actually turn out to be the site owner's fault. They're not using standardised web technologies, not testing their work in multiple browsers. Mozilla employees and contractors will try to perform outreach to these site owners, but they're often not interested.
What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked there.
This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
I don't log which sites break - if it's important I tend to cave and open Edge for that site, do my business, and then go back to Firefox for everything else. If it's less important, I'll opt to just not to business with them. But I'm a grain of sand so it doesn't make much difference.
Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
I checked for webcompat issues matching this description and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the cart didn't work.
I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot block visitors from my location.
> This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
Can't reproduce, I was able to buy a CD Key ("Garfield Kart - Furious Racing PC") at 28 May 2022, 16:51:52 BST using Firefox 100.0.2 and a debit card.
> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
Can't reproduce. Visiting https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-baby-formul... in Firefox shows me the exact same content as when I use Chromium.
I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues, but they're definitely not widespread and your post doesn't give enough information to go on to diagnose if there's an issue with Firefox or not.
The best thing you can do is report issues to the webcompat project as and when you come across compatibility issues. It takes about 20 seconds, less time than you probably spent writing this comment.
It really sounds like you are. I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it. Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?" responses.
It's open source victim blaming.
Which is obviously why I explicitly said I wasn't!
> I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it."
How do you expect progress to be made if we can't precisely discuss browser issues & how to reproduce them in a way that enables them to be investigated and fixed?
For all we know at the minute, the OP has an extension installed that's causing all this.
> "Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?"
Because that's totally what I asked :eyeroll:
Just to be sure I went back again today. Still could not purchase Horizon Zero Dawn. The error in the console was "No recaptcha clients exist."
I then went to Edge, and I able able to successfully make the purchase.
I'm a Firefox user. I'm a fan. But to pretend that there aren't sites that test in Chromium and call it a day isn't reality.
I mean, I have the game code right in front of me, ready to redeem.
> Just to be sure I went back again today. Still could not purchase Horizon Zero Dawn. The error in the console was "No recaptcha clients exist."
Still can't reproduce with this item - have you tried it in a fresh profile?
I can say I recently found I couldn't make a new account at 'wise.com' in firefox (had to switch to chrome), and an internal university website doesn't work in Firefox -- but of course, I can't share that page publicly, so there's not a lot useful I can do with that.
> but no page I could submit
Click the large "Report bug" button and you'll get to https://webcompat.com/issues/new
The one major category of real problems I run into are related to captchas.
Try opening the site in incognito mode. It usually fixed these random issues.
> Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
Installing the "Privacy Pass" extension can significantly reduce captcha challenges when visiting sites that use cloudflare.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this maybe just the paywall? I'm not sure if you've been reading more articles on Firefox and then only opened on Chrome or something after this started happening, but it sounds like that could be what's going on.
However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...
The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.
MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have been people.
Name a feature that Firefox doesn't have that prevents people from using the web. I can't. But I can name several that I've seen work more correctly on Chrome because they have the resources to make it work in the context of very complicated and legacy-filled rendering engines (flexbox comes to mind) where Mozilla appears to not (ask me about my favorite Firefox-only flex performance issues... To their credit, they have all been fixed, but FF spent a lot of time behind the curve).
Are you saying that there are people at Google whose job description is to tweak Google web products to perform worse on Firefox, just so Chrome appears better in comparison?
Shot in the dark: sounds like a timeout in TCP, DNS, or something like that.
Disabling JS kept the content from vanishing.
Of course, this is almost certainly bad coding on the website's side, and not the fault of Firefox. But it seems like it's but getting the QA attention it needs from the site owners.
Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
Complex interactive sites, like crypto exchanges. They are slow and with many rendering artefacts in Firefox. Probably because they don't even bother testing in Firefox.
I recently had similar issues, and it turned out that Firefox’s cache was constantly nearly-full. Clearing the cache returned YouTube to normal.
Hmmm... I've never had this problem and I use YouTube heavily. You sure your video acceleration and codecs and all that are set up right?
Right-click -> Open With mpv
It's a pain in the ass, but the performance gap is immense. On a desktop I wouldn't bother, but on my laptop this has a real impact on battery life.
web.skype.com
Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/) -- apparently no support for insertable streams
stuff.co.nz from outside NZI tried stuff.co.nz from the UK and it looked like this: https://imgur.com/a/tibMwHE
Articles loaded fine; I'm not sure what is broken about it.
Oh, and I did turn off uBlock Origin, for that matter.
I even have some vague recollection of Mozilla mentioning just this. Like 99% when something is broken it not because the browser but because some addon the user installed.
So test a site that you dont think works with the "troubleshoot mode" in Firefox that inactivate addons etc to see if it works then. And if it works, then figure out which addon it is that makes the mess and to blame.
I used to use Decentraleyes but I ended up uninstalling that completely because it broke so many sites.
Tab syncing is a small meaningless change to me, but not to you. Some of these things you find small and meaningless could be important to some other people (for example, multilingual spell-checking is very important to some people, X11 isolation is very important to some others).
What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ?
Investing in their browser. Investing in an alternative ecosystem.
Brave have added in-browser Torrent, TOR, IPFS support. That's what I would expect from Mozilla, trying to differentiate itself. Now we've lost the compact UI, got coloured themes for one release. What's cooking that's really exciting? What's the plan to retake some of the lost market share? I can't see any thirst to improve over there.
Useless bloat. Dedicated torrent clients are made better and work better.
> TOR
Interesting, but the popular advice is to only use the Tor Browser. I don't know if that's good advice or not, but it certainly dampens my enthusiasm for Brave supporting Tor.
> IPFS support.
When I actually find a real use for IPFS, then I'll be able to form an opinion on it. Until then, it's just an obscure novelty to me. What can I actually do with it? Torrents and traditional websites together work for downloading/hosting/sharing anything I can think of.
This was actually the killer feature for me on chrome about 5 years ago and then Google did what Google did, and killed it.
I also send pages in the opposite direction.
finding a cool article while I'm sitting
on the couch and sending it to my desktop so
I can read it later
I solve this by having a list of links on the web that I can access from everywhere.
It takes 20x as much time and work to copy a link, context switch to another app, paste, then, when you're on the desktop, _remember_ to check that shared document, and open the link, than to just press option menu, send tab, choose linux desktop and bam!, it's there as soon as you open your browser the next day.
I'm more concerned with Firefox's lack of per-tab screenshare in meet/jitsi/etc.
Have you tried KDEconnect? I use it to share/send links from Android to Linux and vice versa with the KDEconnect browser extension.
I still use it, though.
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1523
It's exactly this type of behaviour that Firefox doesn't seem concerned with addressing.
The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
It includes a Docker Compose setup.
Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale to support the millions of Firefox users who use Mozilla's instance.
So the above (synstorage-rs_in_container) is now the only required software needed, and now includes the identity-server portion?
I would really like to use the "beam-a-tab-to-some-other-firefox", been a FF user since before it got that name. But i wanted to self-host all parts, and then found some info, that suggested, that 2 parts are needed: the SyncServer, the above open-source thing, and the Identity-server, on which i did not find much info at the time.
Do you have a link to recent-ish write-up of the current situation, that you can validate to be correct-ish?
Thanks again
Also, w.r.t Directory-Servers/Security: Enterprise printers have been able to authenticate Users with SSL/TLS-secured connection for more than a decade. So why not a "syncserver for URLs of open tabs per User"?
https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2020/09/15/the-future-of-s...
But, as you mentioned, the current documentation is here:
https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
You might also find the unofficial Arch User Repository package, comments, and PKGBUILD file helpful:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-syncstorage-git
I hope it works out for you!
https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...
There's a lot of components directly hooked into Google Cloud that also make it difficult in terms of configuration. At some point I think creating an actual user's guide for this would be good for the community interested in self-hosting this on their own.
I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium.
Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me from switching honestly.
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1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.