Not the person you're responding to, but no. Until uMatrix actually breaks for me, I'm not switching to Firefox.
Switching is a pain, and I don't like Firefox's UI/UX. I'd switch if they did this because I value the extension very highly, but I wouldn't be happy about it.
Maybe I'm not as critical about the UI, but I have both browsers open at the same time so I took a second to compare them.
Both browsers have a row of tabs. Below that is a second row. The left most set of buttons is navigation (back, forward, refresh, etc), then the address bar, then on the very right of the row is a set of buttons for extensions, settings, etc. The remaining portion of the window is the webpage. I'm just not seeing many differences. The view of recently downloads is different, but nothing that bothers me from either one.
I also just compared how both browsers displayed HN main page. Slight differences in color of orange and font weight, but only noticeable if comparing both directly (and besides devs, who does that?).
So I guess I'm asking what about the UI/UX is bothering you. I'm almost hesitant to ask because I'm sure if you point something out that bugs me, I'll never un-see it.
Firefox doesn't deal with touchscreen and touchpad gestures very well. Take, for instance, the two-finger pinch-zoom-in gesture. Chrom(ium), Opera, Edge, Safari etc. all smoothly and instantaneously magnify the area where the mouse is. Firefox, on the other hand, reflows the entire page with each zoom (as the other browsers do when you do a ctrl +/- zoom), which is inconsistent with how we're used to interacting with touchscreen devices, in addition to being quite laggy on a reasonably modern laptop and tending to undershoot or overshoot the desired zoom level. This zoom behavior is also a lot less useful for looking at a particular item on the page, since the reflow-zoom doesn't seem to depend on mouse position on any way (so any element not at the center of the screen will no longer be visible past a certain zoom level, no matter where you put the mouse pointer when zooming in), which makes using it a lot more frustrating on smaller monitors.
I do not own a touch screen device that is not a mobile device, so I have not experienced that. I also realize that my comments only related to the UI portion, not taking into account how responsiveness (or lack of) affects the UX portion.
I am a firefox user but will switch to chrome when using google maps. Simply because using maps on firefox on my windows tablet sucks, but its a breeze in chrome.
Otherwise I completely avoid chrome because of the privacy issues, and because firefox has 'containers' and is a little snappier.
On the surface they're quite similar, I agree. I won't pretend that Firefox has some whole separate UX decision process that's ruining it for me. It is, like all decisions between similar products, a matter of my own pet nit.
I dislike Firefox's zooming behavior. I have to zoom into websites because I have poor vision. Chrome's zoom behavior has been extremely natural for me, and easy to adjust to. When I used Firefox I attempted to use 'vanilla' as well as an extension that aimed to improve the zooming behavior by separating scale of text from scale of other elements, etc.
I was unable to find a solution that worked for me. I hated using the extension, which itself had a pretty bad UX, and I couldn't get preferences to save properly for individual webpages.
I can't use a browser with poor zooming behavior, I rely on it too much. As I write this I am zoomed in 250% in Chrome, for example.
Those pet-bugs or pet-nits are, in my opinion, the huge thing that keeps people from moving (alongside the perceived friction of moving data over). I wouldn't read too much into mine.
> When I used Firefox I attempted to use 'vanilla' as well as an extension that aimed to improve the zooming behavior by separating scale of text from scale of other elements, etc.
Your reply resounded with me a little. I agree with the person you replied to, I don't like the UI/UX.
I think it's the 'second level' of UI stuff - menu's behind buttons, settings pages, things like that. I think Chrome does a good job balancing 'advanced user' and 'basic user' stuff. Firefox feels a little too 'dumbed down' for me.
I'm honestly trying hard to put a fine point on it, but it a lot of it just feels 'off'. I'd love a very minimal-design, maximum function look into it.
I was going to add a stipulation about the about:settings type stuff being different and what not, but chose not to originally. My thinking was how often are you in settings that it's a problem? I'm not a browser power user, so I only go in to the settings usually after reading something here. I set it, and forget it. Maybe 30 seconds?
As far as dev stuff, I'm really only familiar with Firefox after Firebug was rolled into the browser so that it is similar to Chrome with a Cmd-Option-i key press. I hear people stating that the dev tools are still very different. All I really ever use it for is seeing how the DOM is changing in the inspector, looking for output in the console, and see what files are doing (404,200,500, params/response, and CSS values type of stuff. Both browsers do what I need in a way that I can't tell the difference.
It's almost entirely the more in-depth stuff. For example, differences I find annoying include seeing raw ajax values, re-runnning those queries, and how Chrome can't select individual log levels to view in the console.
On top of that, various parts of Firebug's console UI was better than either one's current console, mainly in how it displayed data.
I felt like this as well when I was still using Chrome for everything (I switched when Firefox launched Quantum). For me it simply turned out that after getting used to Firefox (again) I had no problems at all with the UI. Chrome felt better before the switch because I was used to it.
> I also just compared how both browsers displayed HN main page. Slight differences in color of orange and font weight, but only noticeable if comparing both directly (and besides devs, who does that?).
So on the color thing, one of our designers noticed and I looked into it. Turned out to be an open bug report for Chrome(ium? I forget) where it's using the wrong color profile for css, and resulted in images not matching borders and backgrounds.
I found that I actually like the UI in firefox after customizing it. For me it may have been easy because I use sway (i3 clone on wayland -- clone is the best, it is actually more / better than i3). But it really ended up looking nice[0]. I found I could customize more things that I could on chrome, including the start page.
In any case, if you don't switch, I urge you to give it 15 mins and tinker with the ui config and a home page config. You can rid your self of alot of weird chrome bits that I think most find ugly and make it look smooth.
Further more, you can set up your own sync server and sync all your stuff to a safe spot.
I actually don't switch to Firefox because I'm on i3. I fell in love with surf-like browsing, and am able to somewhat get the same result with chrome in --app mode. There is however no way (to my knowledge) to get tab-less full-window browsing in Firefox.
edit: I just installed the tab-less extension, edited my userChrome.css, and I'm really happy with the results. I'm going to give Firefox a go from now on!
I don't have a screenshot right now, but it's just as you might expect, the whole tab line is removed (the nav bar line with menus comes to the top instead). [This post](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/736cji/how_to_hide...) talks about doing the same thing in the context of tree-style tabs. Good luck!
There's also Brave and Kiwi browser if they disable/limit this api in their extensions there's no stopping Chromium-based browsers from implementing them natively outside of extensions.
On the Mac, Safari is far more power efficient. With each update I notice Firefox is using more and more ram too. Also good luck finding out which tab is causing problems.
Last time I did a DOM benchmark Chrome still beat it by a significant margin. Also, only personal experience, but Chrome seems way more responsive with multiple tabs open than Firefox.
One annoying thing is that current versions of Firefox seem to rely on disk I/O too much, so if it's busy, you can't really do anything (switching or creating new tabs is greeted by spinning loading circle that takes a long time to happen).
IIRC, the complaints I've read online are along the lines of: Mozilla ran a Mr Robot ad campaign with browser integration, partnered with an ad company for some research in a seemingly-sneaky way, made their CEO resign (now the CEO of Brave) because he donated personal money to an anti-gay marriage lobby effort, forced pocket integration for ad revenue purposes, and they deprecated their extension api which broke most extensions that did not get updated.
I'm not saying anything in favour of or against these decisions, they're just what I remember reading people complain about over the last year.
Firefox UI feels like it was left behind. When I open up Firefox I feel like I've stepped into last decade. I realize this is just a personal opinion but it's strong enough to keep me from using FF. I was also super irritated with their default tab that shows all of the links you visited. I prefer my porn not showing every time I open a new tab. Features like this one, even if easy to disable should be opt in, not opt out. Any company that enables an opt out feature by default will get the boot unless no alternative exists. I know, it's harsh, but I vote with my usage and with my money.
I'd recommend giving Brave a try if you haven't already.
It's built on top of Chromium so has the same UI/UX as Chrome, including dev tools. And it does ad blocking out of the box, no need for an extension even.
Threats are useful for shaping behavior. Disengaging with someone because they suggested something you disagree with can be good for shaping behavior, but it's really pretty extremist.
Other browsers won't prevent you from any of these things. Some browsers are on par with Chrome when it comes to speed and extensibility (plugins and such).
I have written this a few times here already, I can repeat it again: Firefox wiped their extension store semi-recently and the long tail didn't recover yet. I actually just checked my usual roster and it is better than last time but not yet.
Nope, not as long as Firefox randomly paints text boxes black (a bug report that is now old enough to vote) and hard refresh doesn't work. I expect to be able to do work on my browser, and Firefox just gets in the way.
Linux, when you have a dark desktop theme, Firefox changes the default and background colors of websites to match, often resulting in black text on black background.
It's infuriating, and the devs say they wont fix it because they expect websites to stop using custom color schemes and respect user desktop themes instead.
Yes, but also less so every day. Google has already figured out that they should serve Youtube ads and content from the same servers to limit the ability of DNS based ad filtering.
DNS filtering is a cat-and-mouse game that DNS filtering tools will eventually lose. Don't get me wrong, I love Pihole and have used it for a while, but I know that I'm on the losing side of this battle.
DNS filtering has been on the "losing side" for a few decades now. As long as more than 0.1% of people don't use it, it's not worth solving for most ad companies. Even if places like YouTube DO find ways to stuff ads into my face (likely at great technical and operational expense to them), I make it a point to NEVER EVER buy anything advertised, search for any of it, etc. Because they know so little about me (I go out of my way to block as much telemetry and data sharing as possible), their ads aren't very relevant to me anyway, so they're literally just wasting money serving me an ad, trying to pressure me into paying for their premium service. Instead, I just get annoyed if there are too many ads and find something else to do. It would probably serve them better to just realize that some users won't ever convert, and stop wasting time serving them ads.
So you're getting down voted, but I totally agree. I too used to disable javascript using NoScript every where until it was a site that I was okay with. I played the game of only allowing javascript from the same domain, and then looking at the remaining scripts the site wanted to request. CDNs for jQuery, FontAwesome, etc, started to get whitelisted. Anything else, nope. If the site didn't work after that, then the tab was closed. After allowing NoScript to run javascript, I would then lean on uBlock to block the trackers etc that were loaded by anything I missed. It's amazing how difficult surfing the web like this was.
They're not a charity, but their business model is based on ads and they rely on the network effect to support that model. People who can't see anything at all will immediately defect. No revenue at all from the moment that policy is implemented, plus significant risk that enough will leave to weaken the network effect. People who are forced to watch ads with their content will grumble, some of them might eventually defect, but for the most part they will stay and continue generating revenue. Less immediate impact to the bottom line, and hardly any risk of undermining the network effect.
The "just go away" approach is proving suicidal for online newspapers and magazines. It would be no less so for YouTube. Their content is neither compelling enough nor exclusive enough for that to work.
How could YouTube know you won't ever convert beforehand, and at scale? If they started blocking users for suspicion of not buying anything from ads they would have to block a sizeable portion of their traffic and that would have a negative impact on their company.
Privoxy (and Proxomitron before it) were doing it 20 years ago, but never caught on because they're a PITA to setup and can't handle inline adverts. Pi-hole is new, but it's even more work to setup, and suffers the same limitations.
And as ad-blocking has become more popular the problems only gotten worse. It's unusual that I see any ads any more, but when I do it's always in an inline div or span with a "random" id or class name, essentially invisible to pi-hole.
I still use Proxomitron. It's as powerful as the filters you write for it, works across all browsers (including the "hidden" ones embedded in apps and such), and the community has made patches that let you MITM TLS as well using OpenSSL (although the certificate setup needs a bit of planning and understanding.)
The only downside is that its filtering language is regex-like, so basically the equivalent of "two netcats and a sed". I've contemplated writing a filter proxy that would parse HTML into a DOM, run filtering on that tree-structured representation using something XPath or XSLT-ish, and then reserialise the modified HTML to send to browsers, but never had the time to. I suspect performance wouldn't be great with such a setup, although with MITM TLS it's already doing a double-encrypt-decrypt and I don't find that slowing me down noticeably.
Why doesn't it? (Not a leading question, I just don't understand why it doesn't) Isn't the way uBlock and the like work is that they see network requests from a blacklist and not load those resources? Isn't network level blocking just moving that from the local device up a level?
They do (well partly), but with network level blocking you end up with broken DOM elements (like images, videos, etc.) The good think about the browser extensions is that they clean up the DOM and in many cases you wouldn't even know if the pages had ads.
Then there's also Javascript trickery loaded with the page that do hostile things if ad servers aren't reachable, and extensions know how to detect and replace them.
I think the closer the blocker is to the user, the higher the fidelity of the blocking.
A browser extension has access to the actual requests, while all a network level blocker has is the Server header of a TLS packet at best, just an IP with SNI encryption at worst. That's why PiHole works as a DNS proxy by only properly responding to non-blacklisted hosts with a proper DNS response, but even this might be useless in some cases due to "domain fronting".
A PiHole only sees the DNS request, which works fine if ads are served from a separate hostname like ads.mydomain.com. But if they're served from the same sub-domain and simply have a different URL (ie, mydomain.com/ads/[...]), then the PiHole won't block it. uBlock/ABP will, because they can filter on entire URLs, not just the domain.
uBlock (and AdBlock Plus) can access and prune/block individual DOM elements, and even has a built-in tool (the eye dropper icon) to select and block them. I think they call it "cosmetic filters". It's also available in the right-click context menu under "Block element".
I don't know exactly how it works under the hood, though. If I block a div with text in it, I know the div is still downloaded, just not displayed. I don't know what happens in more complicated cases, like if I block a div that contains an img tag. I think it's smart enough to prune the img tag before the browser downloads it, but IDK for sure.
I vaguely recall Privoxy having some kind of content filtering, but when I tried it, it wasn't html/css/javascript aware, and only did regex based replacement.
I guess I am missing something. I have a Pi-Hole setup at both home and office that serve as the only DNS for the entire network at both locations. I don't see ads, affiliate links don't resolve, and tracking/monitoring services don't capture my traffic.
My experience has been that it took about 30 minutes to setup and I don't see ads on the internet, nor do my family or team.
I can’t speak for pi-hole, but Diversion on Asuswrt-Merlin works fantastic for me. No ads ever except for YouTube ads lately due to google’s changes to how they serve ads from the same servers they provide services on.
There's a huge difference between "doesn't work very well" and "works perfectly except for one really sneaky ad company, sometimes". How does ublock origin cover scripts and ads for my entire network? Did you even look at what I'm talking about before making such general statements? My router blocks hundreds of thousands of incidents per week, and there are only two people in my household. One can't use a browser plugin on android tv, Apple TV, smart tv, and a million other devices. By your own logic, ublock origin doesn't work very well. See what I mean?
Pi-hole and similar solutions are crude compared to uMatrix. I wish that weren't the case. If we didn't have to rely on browser extensions for fine-grained control then alternative browsers like qutebrowser could become more than just toys.
One of my concerns is that DNS over HTTP(s) is really just a way to obfuscate DNS queries from the oversight of network level ad blockers like Pi Hole, AdBloka et al.
You might've noticed most of the new Internet protocols Google is championing move to pushing things through HTTPS where they cannot be intercepted and provide a guaranteed tunnel between the servers (statistically speaking, Google), and the browser (also, statistically speaking, Google). I would never go so far as to speculate why, but it does appear Google is heavily focused on this.
Of course, but my concern is that DoH makes it easier for apps (Chrome, etc) to handle their own DNS queries internally rather than relying on the device's network libraries.
MiTM intercepting HTTP(s) traffic on my Android devices is really difficult due to certificate pinning. The only way to quantify how many unexpected requests apps are making was to watch DNS traffic. If, one day, these apps just make a single DNS request to Google's DoH host then encrypt all their traffic from there onwards, I'd have no insight into what's going on in my own device.
I have a Pi-hole and use uBlock; when I turn off uBlock and use the Pi-hole alone, a ton of ads still seem to come through. This is with the default blocklists (StevenBlack, MalwareDomains, sysctl.org, zeustracker.abuse.ch; about 8 total). Maybe I'm not adding enough lists, but "out of the box" it doesn't seem to cut it.
You may have a secondary DNS. Sometimes that isn't even intentional as ISP modems automatically upstream failed DNS regardless of the local DHCP settings (I'm looking at you AT&T Fiber)
The new trend to slip through is hiding behind cloudflare. I see cloudflare urls being loaded within cloudflare URLs to obfuscate the source of ads and scripts
So this only blocks/matches known domains? That isn't nearly as useful as to what uMatrix/uBlock allow, such as filtering by resource type. E.g. you may want to disable all JS by default, which uBlock allows.
Using uBlock in Chrome is like asking a bank robber to guard an open vault. Sure, they’re smart enough not to steal anything, but they’ll case the joint the entire time and you’ll never sleep well again.
I highly suggest looking into Opera. It is also based on Chromium and therefore backwards compatible with extensions, bookmarks, etc. I switched around 6 months ago and haven't looked back since! They have built in VPN, adblocker, Turbo, screenshot, news, and more! Been really happy with it so far.
Opera is now owned by a Chinese consortium and quite possibly embeds spyware. Check out Brave, instead, which is founded by the inventor of Javascript and extremely privacy-focused.
Saying something quite possibly embeds spyware can be true for almost any company or software. Is there anything specific about the companies that purchased Opera that leaves you with doubts?
I feel like "open source" has become a cheap way to earn trust. Very few people are able to understand code, even fewer actually comb through all the code and fewer still are able to find and decrypt obfuscated code, especially on large repositories. If someone really wants to hide something, publishing under open source isn't going to make a difference. Essentially, whatever you use, there's going to be some degree of trust you must instill to the company and its developers that they will protect and respect your data.
