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NYT: 'Firefox Is Back. It's Time to Give It a Try.' (nytimes.com)
Another high-profile endorsement for Firefox -- this time from the lead consumer technology writer for The New York Times. (Alternate link here).
The web has reached a new low. It has become an annoying, often toxic and occasionally unsafe place to hang out. More important, it has become an unfair trade: You give up your privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads. That's why it may be time to try a different browser.
Remember Firefox...? About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a "crisis of confidence" in the web. "If they don't trust the web, they won't use the web," Mark Mayo, Mozilla's chief product officer, said in an interview.... After testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox's thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser.
The Times cites privacy features like Firefox's "Facebook Container," which prevents Facebook from tracking you after you've left their site.
While both Chrome and Firefox have tough security (including sandboxing), Cooper Quintin, a security researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells the Times that Google "is fundamentally an advertising company, so it's unlikely that they will ever have a business interest in making Chrome more privacy friendly."
Remember Firefox...? About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a "crisis of confidence" in the web. "If they don't trust the web, they won't use the web," Mark Mayo, Mozilla's chief product officer, said in an interview.... After testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox's thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser.
The Times cites privacy features like Firefox's "Facebook Container," which prevents Facebook from tracking you after you've left their site.
While both Chrome and Firefox have tough security (including sandboxing), Cooper Quintin, a security researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells the Times that Google "is fundamentally an advertising company, so it's unlikely that they will ever have a business interest in making Chrome more privacy friendly."
I like some features, but chrome does a very good job, memory eating aside.
Every time I see the sheer quantity of chrome or google processes on a PC, I cringe. Why does chrome need 4 processes before it displays a home/start page? Why does google schedule update checks once at logon and then *every hour*?
Everytime I run a perforamance tuneup on someone's PC, the first place I check is Windows Task Scheduler. Change the frequency of google's updates back to once per day, and NOT at logon. Ditto Adobe's products, and a bunch of Microsoft updates/uploads/telemetry.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
This might be a valid strategy for Firefox future. They destroyed their original advantage of powerful extensions, so they need something new to attract people. Privacy focus just might be it, but if so they really need to emphasize it in their advertising. At least Chrome is unlikely to truly compete with them in this field.
FWIW, the new (or Quantum) version of Firefox stopped me from switching to Chrome entirely. I had been using Chrome more and more as Firefox just seemed to stagnate. Luckily they did seem to make real progress here. I hope they keep it up. A browser monopoly has never been any good for end users.
?
Techno-anarchist delusions. People don't trust Facebook, and yet still use it by the billions...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I notice that the graphic at the top of the article includes 5 browsers, but only 4 are actually mentioned in the article - while Opera is in the graphic it is never mentioned in the article. (I was actually using FF for Android when I read the article.) Given that Opera focuses a lot on the exact features he discusses (speed, security, privacy, battery life) that seems a bit cheap.
That Facebook container is golden. I wish Firefox would take it even further, though. The other day, I was browsing for a new monitor. Then what do you know, I open the desktop Spotify client (free tier) and there's an ad for the same monitor. I really, really hate this shit but I don't know what to do against this tracking. I already use uBlock Origin in Firefox.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Fastest browser, especially on mobile, with integrated ad blocking: https://brave.com/
Firefox was ditched for the same set of reasons that Netscape was ditched:
- Both Firefox and Netscape had become or were perceived as slow and bloated compared to the competition. I vividly remember my eye twitching back in the late 90s during my phone tech support days when I heard a fellow phone jockey recommend Internet Explorer 3 to a customer over Netscape because it was 'so much faster'. This was back in the 28.8/56k dial-up era, so take that into account. Chrome is widely perceived to be faster and more powerful at running webapps than Firefox... and regardless of the reality, this perception goes top to bottom. Developers frequently choose to develop against Chrome and then test against Firefox... if they bother to test against Firefox.
- Privacy, browser configuration, and Internet safety are widely perceived to be 'too difficult'. This was as true in the 90s as it is today. People are intimidated by the reality of what it takes to be safe and private on the Internet and/or far too lazy to learn to configure their browser. Netscape and Mozilla have never quite made it as easy to 'click click click dubya dubya dubya' as their competition. Microsoft and Google both are much better at hand-holding... and leading their 'customers' down the garden path. Installing ad or script blockers *seems* more intimidating on Firefox than similar plugins for Chrome because Google has successfully 'App-Store-Ized' their plugin ecosystem.
- Netscape and Firefox have never been 'The Internet'. Microsoft did its damndest to make sure that Windows users all directly equated that blue 'e' icon with 'The Internet'. Google is its own damn verb. Both companies' marketing divisions have made very good pushes to make themselves synonymous with 'The Internet'.
- Netscape and Mozilla have never had a strong pre-install base. Every Windows Install since 95 has come with IE. Every Android device comes with Chrome. Most folks simply can't be assed to install another browser. Sad but true. If Firefox ever wants to become really relevant, it's going to have to get some kind of mainstream pre-install base going. We're not talking Linux distros here. They're going to have to pull off the Firefox equivalent of an 'Android OS' or 'Chromebook'. It's doable, but Mozilla is not strongly steered the way Microsoft was or Google is. Moz has a long history of dropping the soap far too often.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Please, Mozilla. I never used any other browser. I won't ever, because I know that you're the Good Folks (TM).
But make it easy again to *completely switch off Javascript*. No "NoScript" plugin with cheap cop-outs. Help in keeping a small-but-significant javascript population out there to keep Web "programmers" and frameworks out there honest.
Yeah, I know: users are too stupid to manage this one checkbox, your telemetry proves it (and those now quaint instructions on how to enable Javascript some sites still carry, as a reminiscence of the 2005s). Know what? If you treat your users as idiots, you'll get idiot users. I know how this may be in Microsoft's or Google's interest, but I don't get how it is in yours.
I know, I know. Your perspective is too tightly intertwined with the ad industry's -- they wet-dream of a Javascript API to a brain implant which goes straight into the dopamine center, and you'll deliver because "the others are doing it and you else become irrelevant".
Sigh. I really love you. I want to. But sometimes I hate you.
Did they all collectively forget the "beware predators, don't share personal information online" perma-scare that we had before "toxic" became the new buzzword?
The internet was never safe, the only thing that changed is a bunch of people joined up who expected it to be. We wouldn't even be in this position had users not been convinced blurring their real and online identity was awesome right around when FB and Twitter showed up.
That show 'you have a virus, clean files now' alerts
on mobile ads.
Any site that allows that ad in (ibtimes fuckers) should be auto ad blocked by default as punishment.
The ad hosters should be punished for accepting those ads, or for allowing ads to be updated, or all JS ads.
Those commercial sites deserve to loose millions, if they play dirty, and the advertisers, globally banned on a massive ad black list.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Pocket tracks your site usage to "give you a better home page by providing recommendations of sites to visit" among other things.
They have been investing heavily in PR ever since Quantum disaster hit, and a large amount of people left firefox for any other browser, because there was no longer a meaningful reason to use it.
First PR push was "hey look, we have speed parity with chrome now". Took them a few months to realise that "parity in speed and parity with features" means that people that wanted extra features you axed will leave for mainstream browser, while being on par won't make any meaningful number of people switch the other way.
So now they have been trying other ways of selling firefox. This looks to be one of them, which is just silly. Firefox, as you note, most certainly collects usage patterns. Pocket which is built into firefox literally uses those to recommend web pages you should visit next if you go to your default home page in the browser.
My home page is about:blank. Good luck customising that.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Why are you posting on this site? You appear to be pretty clueless yourself.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The browser that wont make the frogs gay!
... For the appalling treatment of Eich?
No.
Mozilla can continue their fade into irrelevance along with the cancerous SocJus cult
It's insane, somehow funny, how mainstream medias condition users as much as what browser they use.
I haven't used used Firefox in many years. Are its developer tools every bit as good as chrome is today? If not, switching is not a consideration (I don't want to use different browsers for normal use and development)
Mozilla have to watch that they don't make Firefox's default privacy settings so restrictive that they weaken the power of the open Web relative to apps that can ask users permission to do just about anything. Apps are taking over enough already to tie the hands of website developers to do complex things, without any easy way for users to indicate that they trust a site to do certain things.
knowing how to use the internet without letting the internet use you is just as important
even if you have a good secure browser if you go to places like facebook and other malicious websites and give them your personal info to make their profit from then the secure browser is pointless
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The Firefox UI still sucks. Looks like Chrome and makes interacting with the browser quite annoying because everything is hidden behind non-descriptive glyphs. Firefox should recreate the pre 3.x UI as many have requested. Also didn't help that they needlessly changed the extension engine making many excellent extensions unusable. There still is plenty of user-ignoring arrogance at Mozilla. Their developers think they are hot stuff and the users are clueless by definition. Build something we want to use and we will use it. What they offer so far is just not compelling enough to make a switch. If it has to be a Mozilla based browser, then use Pale Moon. It is put together by an excellent team of developers who truly care what users want. Even if they disagree with a user request, they explain in detail why. This is how a FOSS project should be run....not like the trash talking in forums from Mozilla's devs and Dotzler.
So is mine. It still shoves "pages recommended by pocket" in my face when I start typing in an address.
After testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox's thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser.
First, an update to make FF "new! better!" made FireFTP unable to run in FF. So had to find and use a separate app (WinSCP) to support FTP for my website development.
Next, FireBug got killed off in favor of an internal debugger that seemed buggy.
Finally the FF add-on (Kee) that communicates with my password manager (KeePass) won't install on my desktop.
So FF isn't an acceptable option for day-to-day use. I will often test new goodies I put on a website in FF, but if they don't work as expected I debug them in Chrome.
When the support for old extensions is back.
Why are slashdotters discussing politics on this site? They are largely clueless.
Says the crybullies when the politicization of everything is turned on them.
Trump's trolled Democrats into openly advocating open borders and defending MS-13.
How are you going to like it when Republicans start tossing Democrat pols out of restaurants and movie theaters and start beating up and literally trying to assassinate Democratic members of the House and Senate? "Progressives" have done all that in just the past few months.
What goes around, comes around.
Because that is, as I understood, the problem they had in the first place. Politics over quality and skills and a lot of money put into projects that were not core business at a time where the core business was not in too good a shape.
Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against women as engineers. But engineers must be judged on skill, experience and capabilities, not their genetic makeup, skin color or preferences in beverages. Anything else can only cause massive problems.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Mainly thing just soaks up all of the memory of the computer. It isn't like I have hundreds of tabs either - maybe a dozen or so. But I can tell from task mananger that it is consuming virtually everything - minus a little bit to allow Windows to function.
As long as I am just using Firefox, it works OK, but to launch something else, I usually start by shutting down Firefox.
Except for a year or so of trying Opera, FF has been my browser. Right up until the point a couple of years ago when I couldn't take it anymore. So much instability, performance problems, and the change for the sake of change being rammed down my browser. I tried Chromium (I'm on Linux) and I just didn't care for the way Chrome does some things. I then found Pale Moon, and I felt like I was back home with good-ol' FF. I've been using it since, on my home machine and at work (Win10). I can simplify the interface, It's fast, I can still use bookmarks the way I like, and there isn't any spying.
I like keep a set of bookmarks for places I need to login. FF/PM give me the ability to add a description to the properties of my bookmark. That is where I put my password hint for that site. It's all nice and self contained. When I tried Chrome/Chromium, you couldn't do that. That's a deal breaker for me, since I have 20+ sites where I need this "feature". There are many other reasons as well.
I always said I would go back to FF if I felt a compelling reason to go... but I haven't found one yet. I am happy that the FF team is apparently putting in quite the effort to improve it again though, because I wasn't happy with the direction it was going.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
They may claim to be all about privacy and all that stuff, but in reality their main source of reoccurring income has always been from the embedded search features, provided primarily by Google, the company they're talking up as the main enemy of privacy. Because of that I'm genuinely skeptical as to how truly committed they are to privacy as a proper committing to it would require them to stop using Google as the a search provider and we're not seeing anything even hinting towards this. Not only that, they also rather conveniently try to allude they're the only company trying to dedicate themselves to privacy when Opera has been doing that for years and Chromium is also basically a Chrome fork with much of the privacy-compromising stuff removed.
However the core of Mozilla's problems is that they've spent many years more focused on moonshot projects like FirefoxOS and politics, which includes everything from firing their CTO as he was taking the role of CEO on purely political grounds to spending a considerable amount of money modifying the codebase to modify any functionality using Master/Slave naming to not use it. To make up for this shortfall in spending on actual browser development they've also gone ahead and tried to streamline development by removing features despite very vocal opposition from their userbase. Hell, this isn't even the first time they've tried copying what their competition is doing, the last time they did major changes to the UI those changes ended up only making Firefox look more like Chrome and their users naturally hated that because if they'd want to use Chrome, then they'd actually use Chrome.
No, the real fundamental problem Firefox has had for the last decade or so is simply unfocused and incompetent management. Until they can to a complete management "flush" and replace their management with people focused on the actual product rather than everything else, I can't see Firefox going anywhere in terms of it's already small market share.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Seems like /. is being used for advertising more and more these days by these fan boy posts. Firefox is by far more evil than Chrome for shoving Pocket down our throats. I gave up on both Chrome and Firefox for being very evil and opinionistic and having removed keywords.
Tried a variety of others before settling back with Vivaldi. Couldn't be happier, even with its lack of Sync for ages (though they have some dude with a blog who boasts about it) and some minor flaws, but to me is faster and much more usable than either.
Intrigued by the claims that Firefox used a third less memory than--was it Chrome? Or older Firefoxes?--I decided to try using it again. That trial only lasted for a week or so. I'd stopped heavily using Firefox a couple of years ago and switched to Chrome. The main reason was that Firefox seemed to handle Javascript so badly. I'd grown tired of the "A script seems to be running slowly..." messages that popped up five minutes after Firefox had become catatonic. Plug-ins helped to a degree but I found that I was spending way too much time fiddling with filters, allowing this, disallowing that: "Great, I've finally tuned Firefox and its helper plug-ins to render this page with screwing up. But what about next week?" In my latest bout with Firefox, I didn't notice those messages popping up as much but with many web pages I still saw the CPUs pegged at 100% until I got to a console and could issue "killall -9 firefox". They may have done some good things with regard to privacy but until they do more--a lot more--about the poor performance I'll stay away.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
So is mine. It still shoves "pages recommended by pocket" in my face when I start typing in an address.
Try setting these about:config values to stop Pocket:
browser.pocket.api = ""
browser.pocket.enabled = false
browser.pocket.oAuthConsumerKey = ""
browser.pocket.site = ""
extensions.pocket.api = ""
extensions.pocket.enabled = false
extensions.pocket.oAuthConsumerKey = ""
extensions.pocket.site = ""
In Cyberfox, it kills it dead here.
--
If this is paradise, I wish I had a shovel.
about:config
extensions.pocket.enabled = false
browser.library.activity-stream.enabled = false
browser.onboarding.enabled = false
That oughta do it.
... obviously doesn't use plug-ins, or care about sites rendering properly. I've had too many sites not render properly with Firefox. It's not surprising, given the very low market share of Firefox. Web developers do not seem to want to test against it.
I switched to FF a couple months ago because I finally got sick of Chrome's wonky special and completely broken handling of scroll direction.
Hate replying to my own post... but I thought I would try the new FF. I actually still had it on my machine, as Mint has been keeping it up to date.
First thing - backed up my bookmarks from Pale Moon to a json file.
Then tried unsuccessfully for about 10 minutes to FIND the bookmark restore in FF. It was hidden down in the Library > Bookmarks > Show all bookmarks. This is the kind of thing that FF implemented that drives me nuts. In Pale Moon it's under Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks. They imported fine though.
I use mouse gestures, and while the legacy add-on I used was disabled as no longer supported, it did have a "find replacement" button which gave me several options to choose from. I installed Foxy Gestures, and it worked well. I don't use a ton of add-ons, but some are essential and it's always nice to have them to make browsing easier.
I will have to see how configurable FF is now. I am not really into themes, but I like to have words instead of icons for things like back, home, etc. I don't like HAVING to use icons. I couldn't find an immediate way to change that in FF (another thing they did to aggravate me) but will keep looking.
As far as use, it's quick... and is what I would expect from FF. I opened up the same few tabs in each, and looked at the memory usage, and at first glance, was impressed! I have a script I can run to show the top 10 memory users. Slashdot says the output is junk characters and won't let me post the results.
But it was using this: ps axo %mem,rss,comm,ppid,pid | sort -nr | head -n 10
palemoon at the top, with an rss of 812544 (10%), then firefox with 496528 (7.9%). Wow, that looks great.
But... there were 4 "Web Content" processes that were spawned by FF as well. So the real FF total was 1536780 (19%) - almost twice as much as pale moon.
Do I really care? It's yet to be seen. Previously when I left FF it was gobbling up memory and was slow. Now it's consuming plenty, but is fast. I only have 8 GB of RAM on my machine, and I rarely even use half of it. So not a huge deal. But I know on my Windows10 machine at work, I am very often pushing the limits of memory usage. So take my quick test for what it is worth, and check your own usage.
I am not switching back to FF just yet, because pale moon is doing great. But it's good to know that they are making strides in the right direction.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Web designers should be the ones caring about their sites not rendering properly, not you. You should care about the quality of the content.
Asians aren't minorities though. Just look at any newspaper article talking about minorities in college and you will find that Asians are consistently left out of minority status. And we all know racism isn't really racism unless it involves the oppression of minorities.
Asians gotta suck it up like the white people when it comes to college.
That way, you get a stable browser for a full year, that is widely supported on the internet and Big-Boy applications, and your browser is not changing:
Every Six months (Like Edge).
Every 3 months (Like Firefox mainstream)
Every 2 months (Like Chrome)
The new ESR 60 is Fingerlicking Good.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Very few people care about privacy they care about browsers working. Firefox makes it's money off the add revenue by selling default search. So it needs a _lot_ of users. A few hundred thousand privacy focused users won't keep the lights on for a project as large as a web browser.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Thanks for the instructions. I hope they will be helpful to me once I switch my main desktop beyond 52ESR.
My point wasn't that I am haven't stopped pocket though. The point is that if you use default browser, without going into about:config fuckery, which average user is not going to do, firefox tracks your usage closely and is not a "privacy minded browser" by any reasonable measure no matter what PR shills try to tell people.
I had switched to Chrome because Firefox was...slow. But a few months ago, Firefox started making dramatic improvements in performance. But the most important feature that brought me back was the setting that lets you prevent videos from automatically playing. I wish they would make it not even load the video, but at least stopping the playback will do, until then.
Cyberfox is obsolete and not receiving updates. You should really upgrade to a modern, secure browser.
It isn't dead yet, and recently received an update to 5.8.0. It may be shortly, but I'm waiting to see if someone else picks up development. If not, then it's time for something else.
My point wasn't that I am haven't stopped pocket though. The point is that if you use default browser, without going into about:config fuckery, which average user is not going to do, firefox tracks your usage closely and is not a "privacy minded browser" by any reasonable measure no matter what PR shills try to tell people.
"privacy minded browser" is why I switched from Firefox to Cyberfox. While the dev originally said he was going to quit working on it, he hasn't stopped yet. If no one else picks it up after he stops, then it's time for something else.
There are some about:config changes that can be made to FF that thwart the phoning home, many of which are posted on Martin Brinkmann's gHacks blog by one of the regular commenters.
--
"Pieces of Nine! Pieces of Nine!" Another parroty error.
I don't value pockets functionality so i remove the icon. And I thought it was idiotic that it was integrated instead of left as a 3rd party extension.. but...
As far as I can tell, Pocket operates locally; while the pocket extension functionality in the browser does track you *locally*, its about as evil as the firefox "history" list, which is to say: not even slightly evil.
Neither Mozilla nor Pocket receives a copy of your browser history. The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox.
https://help.getpocket.com/art...
Near as I can tell, the list of all pocket recommends is sent to you. Your local browser then filters and sorts the list by comparing it to that. Your history and preferences aren't sent to pocket in this process.
Read how it works for yourself. What part specifically do you object to? What am I missing?
It's an ad blocker, and erases cookies and history when closed,
https://play.google.com/store/...
Google Chrome is said to have made it easy for an extension to do total snooping on the user's browsing, and many of them do so. Chrome includes a module that activates microphones and transmits audio to its servers, and Chrome contains a key logger that sends Google every URL typed in, one key at a time. Google Chrome does a good job securing access to a user's data without telling the user what's really going on or giving the user a chance to stop the behavior they likely don't agree with.
Google Chrome is proprietary software. Nobody but Google has permission to study what Chrome does, alter Chrome, or distribute a modified Chrome. This is also how Google can get away with malware, hardly surprising behavior for a known international spy. As the GNU Project rightly points out:
The New York Times called Google Chrome "secure" but didn't explain how they arrived at that conclusion. Regardless of what they meant by that claim, it's hard to see how any of the above behavior or whatever else Google can get away with via proprietary malware could reasonably be called 'secure'. Any feature Chrome offers has to be considered in the context of being implemented in proprietary software which by its nature imposes a power over its users.
Firefox was never proprietary; users could always inspect Firefox, edit out the portions of Firefox they didn't want to run or redistribute, edit any other part they wished, and distribute the rest (even if under another name with another logo), and Firefox derivatives have done just that many times. There's good reason Tor Browser, for instance, derives from Firefox. Free software (software that respect's a user's rights and community by allowing users to run, inspect, share, and modify the program) provides verifiable security; one need not guess or blindly trust a proprietor to do right by them. Firefox's technical achievements or detriments are thus a matter of spending time developing Firefox. This is a practical example of how you're better off with less technically capable free software than more technically capable proprietary software; we can make Firefox better in a technical sense but we can't make proprietary software free.
Digital Citizen
I use FF in private window, using DuckDuckGo as the search engine, and FF is loaded up with NoScript, uBlock Origin, AdBlock, Facebook Container, NoMiner.
--
I religiously perform the following steps before and after using FF:
I run a batch file with the following commands ...
--
taskkill /f /im iexplore.exe /f /im firefox.exe /f /im chrome.exe /f /im MicrosoftEdge.exe /f /im MicrosoftEdgeCP.exe /auto
taskkill
taskkill
taskkill
taskkill
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 4351
cd\
cd C:\Program Files\CCleaner
ccleaner
exit
--
I have CCleaner remove everything, including all cookies.
Then I run ATF-Cleaner.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
What's more, folks are going on like processes are intrinsically expensive.
On Windows, starting a process is expensive for two reasons: spawn semantics instead of fork semantics, and the common practice of real-time antivirus. On any system, RAM owned by a process and not shared with other processes is expensive, particularly if it causes cached disk sectors to get evicted to make room or (worse) leads to swapping.
They've been working hard to make the new, more secure and (importantly) concurrent system up to scratch.
Let me know when this hard work results in enough functionality in the system to allow a WebExtension counterpart to the defunct Keybinder extension, even if only for disabling accidental presses Ctrl+Q or Ctrl+Shift+Q for quit when I was aiming for Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+Shift+Tab. (No, Restore Previous Session didn't restore text entered into a Slashdot comment composition form last I checked.) That's reportedly waiting on a fix for long-standing bug 1325692.
Yes, it's this kind of bullet point regurgitating PR shilling that I'm talking about.
No counter arguments from me on that one. I'm looking for alternatives to switch to right now, because 52ESR is going away soon.
... You should care about the quality of the content....
It's difficult to care about content when I have trouble reading the content due to rendering issues. So, yes, I do care about rendering problems.
Another user already posted Mozilla's relevant policy page in this discussion, which clearly states that they do indeed reserve the right to track your usage patterns.
What specific mechanism they use for it is rather irrelevant in scope of this discussion. "Oh it's not Pocket that sends it, it's that other module. Pocket just handles the received data based on it" is quite a disingenuous way of dancing around the issue.
>check HOSTS
>add 127.0.0.1 *.facebook.com
>visit facebook.com
>everything still fucking loads
>127.0.0.1 everything from Microsoft to prevent Windows update
>Fucking Windows 10 STILL updates without me telling it to
HOSTS HAS BEEN USELESS FOREVER. OS and Browsers and apps ALL bypass this. Fuck off with your useless shit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I didn't find it. Where is this policy page? Where does it say they track usage patterns of pocket?
Don't forget "Experiments" which are exempt from the standard privacy policy and can collect any information they want.
He can upgrade to a secure browser, but he will downgrade to a modern one. More secure but less functional.
Modern in the sense of functionality, which there is still more of on FF 56 than on the new FF, which by definition makes it a downgrade.
> Firefox's "Facebook Container," which prevents Facebook from tracking you after you've left their site.
Why is this only implemented for FB? Why aren;t they sandboxing everything by default?
Pocket Privacy Policy
Snippet 1:
And above it in a separate paragraph:
and in that same paragraph:
They are collecting this information and telling you they aren't going to use it for anything bad; this always results in they sell your information at some point. I find it *really* hard to believe it's anonymous, as on mobile devices it captures your advertising ID on iOS and Android.
There's a reason people wanted this to stay as an extension.
"Mozilla said the revamped Firefox consumes less memory than the competition, meaning you can fire up lots of tabs and browsing will still feel buttery smooth."
Unless the code for Facebook has changed significantly, I call bullshit on that statement!
I used to use the old Firefox (pre Quantum) with sometimes up to a hundred open tabs (one or more Facebook) and it it slowly built up to using about 2GB memory.
The new Firefox usually has about 3 open tabs, one of which is Facebook, and within hours it has eaten 4GB or more memory and it feels like a glacier, moving ever so slowly...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
In there you'll see you can happily use your computer while those nasty background services you incorrectly claim are making the hourglass spin (they don't, that's the whole point of background service) are quickly loaded.
I can technically "use" File Explorer once I log in, but if I actually try to open anything, the process will be told to get in line for use of the HDD behind all the other updater processes that are trying to use the HDD right now.
You're comparing an update check to something that actively scans every file when it is accessed.
The antivirus "actively scans" the update check executable "when it is accessed." And once the update check is running, it reads the existing main executable to see which version is installed, which causes the antivirus to "actively scan[]" the main executable "when it is accessed." That's two scans per updater at every login.
It may surprise you to know that Core2Duos haven't gotten any slower
Agreed. But the updaters of newer versions of popular Windows applications have become more bloated. Whether it's a Core 2 Duo or the latest i7 matters little because it's not the CPU; it's the HDD. And unless the PC owner splurges for an SSD and an external enclosure for his existing HDD, the laws of physics limit how many random inputs and outputs per second (IOPS) you can get out of an HDD.
My Core 2 Duo laptop running Debian is still snappy. But Debian has the advantage that only one updater is running at once (APT), compared to a separate updater for each application on Windows. Even if background update (such as unattended-upgrades ) is enabled, APT is single-threaded, which gives other applications a chance to use the HDD while APT is using the CPU. In addition, unattended-upgrades doesn't run at every login; it runs only once daily.
You want benchmarks? Make some.
Microsoft already made some of the tools used in my benchmark. Since Windows 8, Task Manager displays what fraction of time is spent servicing disk I/O requests. When a bunch of updaters are running, that's pegged at 100%, which can take a minute or more. Before that, one could look at the HDD access light or just listen to the HDD's head moving back and forth and use a stopwatch from pressing Enter on the password screen to when it settles.
Or use some common sense such as examining the CPU time or memory footprint of the processes on any machine so you can see how completely and utterly irrelevant they actually are.
In my experience, CPU time and memory footprint are less relevant to responsiveness at login than HDD usage time.
Side note: Yes you absolutely should tell those pensioners to throw away Vista, and if their Core2Duos can't run Windows 7 or Linux then throw away the entire PC.
Agreed. But in most cases, an Xfce-based GNU/Linux distribution (such as Debian Xfce or Xubuntu) works well on older hardware, with the exception of oddball laptop hardware without good Linux drivers. So for someone whose PC's preinstalled operating system's support period has ended, my advice is "backup user profiles, wipe, and Linux".
Firefox needs better enterprise support.
How is this considered insightful? Of course as a user of a website I am concerned about content - which is exactly why if my browser can't access that content, or has rendering issues where I can't view the content easily, I will use a different browser that can. I won't bother to try and figure out if it's because of lazy designers, bad standards, or a crappy browser. I will just access the content that I care about in the easiest way. I used to use Firefox, but after I had difficulty accessing the content I wanted, I switched to chrome. Why did firefox have issues? I don't know or care. As long as chrome works I doubt I'll switch back.
The new FF still doesn't have a replacement for CTR so it can still go fuck itself.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
All that seems to be taken in context of 'if you use pocket' this information recorded as part of that transaction. It's also not clear if that is 'extra telemetry'; or whether it's the same telemetry as firefox itself -- which you can turn off if you want.
Nevertheless, I agree it should have remained a simple removable extension to remove all confusion and doubt. I have always been in strong agreement with that.
I find it *really* hard to believe it's anonymous, as on mobile devices it captures your advertising ID on iOS and Android.
I agree. I'd like more information about that from them. Why, and what for; how do they justify that.
I'm using Waterfox, currently based on Firefox 56, and there is an option "Enable multi-process" you can turn off (and I did), the browser is now lean, fast and more importantly won't eat your memory like chromium does.
One thing the Chrome crowd doesn't get is that Chrome is not the only program you want running, so it shouldn't be hogging resources from everything else in the name of "speed", which is ironic because in Linux (across distros) my experience with chromium/chrome is always the same: Fine the first minutes but then it starts swapping and making the desktop unusable if you open/load 10+ tabs or so.
I still use chromium but only for couple of tabs, mostly youtube or anything requiring audio playback (as chromium lets you pick the ALSA device you want), but for heavy browsing Waterfox it is.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Netscape and Firefox are two different browsers. That's almost as bad as confusing netscape with mosaic.
It was a joke. Feel free to laugh, or not.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The idea that we should enumerate and scan for every single on of the billions of executable that we don't want to run instead of code-signing the couple-dozen we do want to run has always been an absurdity.
That'd be fine if there were some counterpart to trust on first use (TOFU) or domain validation (DV) in the code signing certificate management policies of popular operating systems. Mac OS X used to use TOFU, where the user could choose to trust a particular app signed with a self-signed publisher certificate, and then the OS would trust updates signed with the same certificate. But in 10.7, with the introduction of Gatekeeper and Mac App Store, Apple switched to the single-CA model that macOS uses to this day. Apple's certificate is $99 per year, and Authenticode CAs for Windows tended to charge a similar amount last I checked. This poses a financial burden for free software developers and good-faith hobbyist proprietary freeware developers, who find it difficult to afford the necessary certificates and renewals thereto when distributing their work to the public in executable form across multiple operating systems.
It's like designing a door to your office to recognize criminals instead of giving keys to your employees.
In your analogy, how much does it cost to issue each key?
More importantly, RAM that is not being used is sitting idle and not benefiting anyone.
Some amount of free RAM decreases latency when starting a new process or when making a large allocation in an existing process, such as opening a large document, as the memory manager doesn't have to block the process while mass-dumping pages to swap. (Disk cache on the bubble for being evicted helps the same way.) And a laptop with two RAM slots could theoretically power down one slot on demand in order to decrease battery current draw. (I'm not aware of any that actually do.)
My experience has been that the typical system is either I/O or throughput constrained (or just insanely overspecced) rather than being short on RAM. YMMV though.
Mileage does vary. As DRAM prices doubled over the course of 2017, PC makers continued to skimp on RAM in budget models. Just this year, Dell finally increased the RAM of Inspiron 11 3000 series laptops on its deals page from 2 GB to 4 GB. In my experience, Xubuntu is happy with 2 GB, but Windows 10 really needs the 4 GB. This goes double if you run many applications built with Microsoft Electron, such as Slack, Skype, Discord, Atom editor, or Visual Studio Code. Each of these contains a separate copy of Chromium, and none of them share memory the way web applications open in Chromium/Google Chrome or Firefox can.
With modern PCIe/NVMe SSDS, this is even less pronounced.
On a desktop, that's fine, as you can fit both an SSD boot drive and a conventional HDD for bulk data in the case, or an internal SSD and an HDD in a USB enclosure. But I was under the impression that most laptops lack space/slots for both SSD and HDD. Change my mind.
Replace the optical drive with a hard disk caddy
The laptop's optical drive is already external (USB), and I usually leave it at home anyway. I don't have quite the same luxury of leaving the HDD at home. In order to use an internal SSD, I would have to put the HDD in a USB enclosure and carry it everywhere.
or use a hybrid drive
I would have bought my most recent laptop with a hybrid drive if Dell offered a hybrid drive as an option. Which maker of compact (11.6" class) laptops with a hybrid drive should I choose next time? If I were to replace the HDD with a hybrid drive and sell on the HDD, where would I get a good price for the HDD?
if you want both kinds of storage in an older laptop.
It's not even just "an older laptop" that lacks support for "modern PCIe/NVMe SSDS". A Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series laptop purchased new in 2018 still doesn't have an NVMe slot according to this photo with the bottom cover removed. A search on Crucial.com shows only SATA SSDs, intended to replace the HDD, not supplement it.
Who could possibly give a rat's ass what the New York Times says about anything???
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Can you provide an example of a site that A) renders in FF so badly you can't read it and B) has any quality content?
My guess is this is more of an academic argument and there aren't really sites like you describe.