Privacy features lose their way in latest Firefox update Firefox remains the browser of choice for many, but the latest update has lost users' tabs and makes it much more apparent when they have private tabs open, missing the point of privacy. The latest Firefox 127 appeared on June 11 with a modest list of changes – automatically reloading the browser when the OS reboots, closing …
Still feels like I can "configure it the way I want" less and less with each release.
Hopefully the new leadership will realize there is no future for Firefox as a bad Chrome knockoff. I'm not holding my breath, as they pissed away most of their market share and the dev team has continually doubled down on the things that drove them from the teens and relevance into the easily ignored single digits. They are on their way to being a rounding error, and once the idiots let Chrome onto the apple ecosystem, Google will own the web.
I'd love to keep up the good fight, but Firefox just isn't viable as a sole or even primary browser for me anymore. Much like when I gave up and bought my first iPhone, it was an act of hate more than enthusiasm, but surrendering the false hope that anything better was coming soon made the bitter pill of living with the tool I hated the least go down easier.
I got a reflexive twitch when I read the part about the option being buried in about:config then quietly disabled when they thought no one was looking. How many other useful and basic things got ripped out like that over the howls of the user base?
I used to love the option to drag a chunk of the tool bar to the left side and park a narrow row of tool buttons there. Then Firefox decided to create their new Sidebar, that is MASSSIVE, and can't easily be put on a diet. They deleted the ability to set a vertical toolbar, then broke or disabled the extensions that allowed it to be hacked back in. Firefox helped kill off RSS feeds. They started hiding the option to enter text tags for bookmarks so that's probably going away soon too.
Like the author suggested, they are stripping away everything that makes Firefox useful and different. What is the point of trying to reduce it to a "minimum viable" browser in the face of mature competition with 98% market share?
'What is the point of trying to reduce it to a "minimum viable" browser'
Because the more features a browser has, like bookmark syncing, tab management etc etc the less private and secure it can be.
Firefox isn't supposed to compete with the likes of Opera, Vivaldi, Chrome etc etc.
Firefox is its own niche where there is no competition.
Comparing Firefox to Chrome based derivatives is like comparing a kevlar vest to a Marks & Spencer cashmere jumper.
Yeah the M&S jumper is comfy and familiar and is largely inoffensive...but it stains easily and cleaning is complicated because cashmere has complicated washing instructions, you'll never really get the stains out. A kevlar vest on the other hand, keeps you safe at all times and can be cleaned with a garden hose.
> Firefox isn't supposed to compete with the likes of Opera, Vivaldi, Chrome etc etc.
??? And who is it supposed to compete with, according to you? Sorry, but a browser is a browser, and Firefox has been successful because it was able to be a lot of different things to different people. You, me, others, each with his own preferences and needs.
A pseudo-private browser for the handful paranoid out there has no future (they should use Tor anyway). A browser which you can lock down if you feel like it has a future, and that what Firefox has been for many years.
.
> Firefox is its own niche where there is no competition.
You mean the niche Netscape is in? The "some-big-corp-killed-me" one?
Tor browser is based on Firefox you bonehead.
Firefox isn't supposed to compete with anything, which is why it doesn't. The point of Firefox is to be stable and secure...that is it...most of the other browsers out there aren't really competing either because they're all Chromium derivatives so they can't actually compete on a technical level...which is why you get all the cruft included, Opera GX being the most egregious. That browser ships with so much crao included it's insane. It's basically Chromium with a metric shit ton of plugins preinstalled.
In the world of browsers you have the massive market share of Chromium browsers...which are all the same browser essentially, but with different tattoos and face piercings but not a lot of substance, they compete at a superficial level. Then you've got Firefox.
Firefox is the only mainstream browser that isn't Chromium based. See the list here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)
Not all of them are listed though, there are many, many more.
Amongst Chromium browsers, you aren't really making a choice, you're just choosing a different paint job and a different default config.
This is why we need to support Firefox...if they die, there is no alternative to Chromium...we end up in a world with basically one web browser...which is a fucking grim thought.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to use a Chromium based browser, some people are very basic and like shiny things. It is what it is.
Just don't kid yourself into thinking you made an actual technical choice and that one Chromium browser is more secure / performant than another, because you didn't. You made a superficial choice. They all perform the same, the all render sites the same...the only difference is the extra fluff you get, a different face and different gimmicks design to make you go "oooh" while they shuffle your data off.
There is nothing Opera can do that Google Chrome can't. There is nothing Edge can do that Vivaldi can't. etc etc...they may come configured out of the box with different settings and they may expose different parts of the underlying Chromium engine (which you can expose in any browser by changing the settings)...but they are fundamentally the same.
Think about it this way, if you walked into your local pub and you saw that the 8 beers they served were all based on Fosters, they all taste the same, they are all the same, but the only difference is they were served in different glasses and came from different taps, would you be happy? I doubt it.
Well, I'll be proud to be one of the few.
Any developer that ignores alternate browsers is fucking AIDS. Professionally and from a business point of view. It doesn't make sense for a software developer to target one browser engine. The whole reason they have software to develop is because someone somewhere decided "yeah, I can do that better in a different way" or "If we do this differently, we can compete in this space" or even better "everything that exists is crap, here is how it should be done"...it's crazy...you can't write game changing, world beating solutions by targeted a homogeneous mono culture of tech...you are basically placing your balls in the hands of a single project...and investors money.
If you target just one browser...$chromium = ['opera', 'edge', 'google_chrome', 'vivaldi' ...] ... and the Chromium project makes a breaking change to their JS DOM / renderer etc, or one of the commercial players using Chromium develops a distate for you and uses their influence to get your tech blocked...you just lost your entire customer base overnight...they can no longer use your product and they can't use it elsewhere.
You develop for the web using web standards...nothing more, nothing less...if any browser, engine, plugin etc forces to stray from those standards...you have to question their motives...why would they want you to stray from an agreed, widely accepted, industry standard? What is their motivation?
Take Internet Explorer for example, and browsers of that era...Microsoft wanted to dominate the space...quite a lot of sites back then worked only on Internet Explorer. Was their motivation:
1. To provide the best possible experience for you, the user.
2. To encourage developers to write better software on their platform for you, the user.
3. To lock out competition and kill it off to increase their own market share and dominance? Giving them majority control of the market and more power when it came to setting standards. Users be damned.
It certainly wasn't the first two because IE fucking stunk...and it got worse as time went on...eventually nobody wanted the flaming paper bag of shit that Microsoft was leaving on their doorstep, which is why we ended up with Chromium in the first place. They didn't start out as the villain, but eventually they became the villain. Chromium will be no different. It won't take that long for people to realise that even though they're swapping around browsers, they're not actually going anywhere.
That's because few developers are actual passionate geeky developers these days. Most people that work in the industry these days are there for the job, not the passion for it. We're a long way from the 90's.
It's becoming increasingly less common to find people in tech circles that are genuinely passionate about tech...or rather, the sheer number of jobsworths that have arrived over the last decade or so are drowning them out. It's like looking for that stunning piece of hand crafted cherry wood furniture in a vast, boring ocean of IKEA flat pack.
I get involved in a lot of prototyping and early product development, I have done for decades and these days the fire is just gone amongst the people that show up.
At the beginning of my career in the mid 90s the question was always:
"What's the best way to solve this problem using current tech?" or "I wonder if it's possible to do X?" and "We should use XYZ technology, because that is the best!"
These days it seems to be:
"What is the fastest, cheapest way to clone that and / or get it to market?" and "We should use XYZ framework/technology because that is where the users are"
Technology stopped being about progress and invention a long time ago...it's all about chasing users these days.
One thing that strikes me is that development effort seems to be aimed towards random fiddling, wasting time adding features users don't want or removing features that users like. Looks like some leadership required to bring back some concentration on their core competencies.
I still want to chalk up things like this as mis-steps or poorly-considered decisions, rather than outright malice or devious manipulation and/or exploitation of the users.
But the more it happens, sometimes without being (fully) reverted, makes it harder to give the benefit of the doubt.
So far I've not been highly impacted by Mozilla mis-steps or decisions, and so I keep on with Firefox. Perhaps I dodge the worst of the shell-shock because I tend to run stable Linux releases and thus don't get the most recent Firefox versions (my Debian has 115.10.0esr at the moment) with the more aggressive changes.
I quite understand other folks' sentiments: everything else is worse. But it's hardly an aspirational bar to clear, is it?
You have much more faith in the Moz developers than I do. For the last 5 years, its seemed like every change they have made is 1) because some developer doesn't think that's an important option or 2) their telemetry shows that its not ever used.
The problem with this is that some of the developers appear to have severe tunnel vision (or should I have said severe autism and mild mental retardation), and, users with telemetry disabled appear not to exist to Mozilla.
> .. it takes a solid two seconds to load El Reg—with ads blocked ..
Almost instant here, maybe a conflict with a plugin, try blocking unwanted connections with a hosts file.
Or try running an external adblocker, like privoxy, like I do. I really don't trust plugins, or even the built-in password manager; the need for plugins I can't get around, since Mozilla has made UI customization effectively impossible without them, but I prefer to use things that are available externally to a browser whenever possible, both for security and performance reasons. Also, look through about:config and see how many external URLs Firefox wants to connect to; their privacy boasts are very suspect, IMO.
From https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
"Firefox is made available to you under the terms of the Mozilla Public License. This means you may use, copy and distribute Firefox to others. You are also welcome to modify the source code of Firefox as you want to meet your needs. The Mozilla Public License also gives you the right to distribute your modified versions."
"automatically reloading the browser when the OS reboots, closing duplicate tabs"
The last thing I would want would be the browser opening on every reboot - I start it when I want it. And as to closing "duplicate" tabs, why? And on what basis? If it's based on the URL, that's a bugger. When I'm updating a site I frequently load the 'before' site in one tab and the 'after' in another so I can rapidly switch between them to see the difference. So thanks but no thanks to both these bright ideas. The time has clearly come to stop allowing the browser to update itself and stick with the release that does what one wants.
Today's release fixes the private window taskbar icon "issue". Mozilla appears to have been listening, hopefully that will continue...
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