Not many straightforwardly positive comments here so far, so I will write one.
I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up!
My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact: it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's great.
dao- 27 days ago [-]
Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this.
I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.
For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.
Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
nokeya 27 days ago [-]
Tab groups again? I don’t remember when exactly, but like 10 years ago Firefox already had this feature. I was using them happily, organising all my numerous tabs to a dozen of groups by theme (work, social, movies, etc). But then Mozilla decided: “Nobody is using tab groups, screw it!” and removed them. All groups and tabs were lost. Now history will repeat?
dao- 27 days ago [-]
I remember, I was around back then. :) Panorama was in some ways ahead of its time. The UI was nice visually but also somewhat heavy handed / not very beginner friendly to say the least, which contributed to it being used only by a relatively small share of our user base.
We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.
nokeya 27 days ago [-]
It was used by advanced users. And what advanced users do? Disable telemetry;) So, I suppose the share was a little bigger but not that much.
eddyg 26 days ago [-]
Or, just don't disable (anonymous) metrics.
There's a BIG difference between tracking and metrics, but they are often treated the same, especially by "power users".
titusjohnson 26 days ago [-]
There's no difference between tracking and metrics, they're the same thing. You get your metrics out of the data you track. Browser phone home? Tracking.
And there's no way for a user to validate that any tracking is indeed anonymous. The technical level needed to asses this is just... out of reach for everyone (the quantity of people who can properly verify this is small enough we can safely ignore it when speaking generally and use the coloquialism Everyone)
eddyg 26 days ago [-]
There is definitely a difference between tracking and metrics. One saves and associates information like “when and where did this piece of data come from?” along with other “identifiable” information, the other simply increments a count for things like “advanced feature X enabled”. If you don’t see the obvious difference between this type of data, then that’s on you. The latter can provide extremely valuable signals, and when “power users” disable it (and tell regular users to do the same, spreading FUD) because they think it’s “tracking” (it’s not), that’s their problem when a tool/app/service starts moving in directions they don’t like.
titusjohnson 25 days ago [-]
I was too succinct in my previous message, I guess.
To you and I there is a difference between tracking and metrics. To everyone else there is none. All my Mom knows is that the software dialed home. It is impossible to verify what it said to the mothership. The popup promised "Metrics only!" but then Little Snitch lit up like a Christmas tree 4 times! It's stealing my info!
How does the consumer know that the "metrics" didn't include home IP, OS version, and god knows whatever else? Again, metrics are a subset of data. Even the internet request to ship a fully anonymized usage info like "saved_files: 10, opened_files: 11" metric set contains Gobs and Gobs of identifiable information on and around the request itself. Does the company stash inbound request data for troubleshooting? That's fucking tracking bro. Your data dog instance is chock-full of tracking info.
It is not reasonable to expect end-users to be able to verify the claim that "only metrics are tracked". It is safer for everyone to assume this is a bald-faced lie, because at the end of the day it is impossible to verify to any level of certainty.
krageon 23 days ago [-]
They're treated the same because they are the same, which people with domain knowledge (i.e. power users) are aware of.
A terrible way to get them to stop doing something you don't personally agree with is by starting your post with a bad idea, support it with a lie and close it with a personal attack.
LtdJorge 26 days ago [-]
I explicitly enable it
Y_Y 26 days ago [-]
Maybe instead of ubiquitous stupidity-tqxax telemetry we could have some neo-Nielsen families and get to pick a roughly representative sample out of voluntary, compensated users. A trusted third party contracts the victims and agregates the data. Don't ask me who regulates or pays though.
jackstraw14 26 days ago [-]
> A trusted third party
And why wouldn't it be Nielsen :) I remember when they sent me cash in the mail as a kid, fun times.
cbsks 26 days ago [-]
They still do that. Just a few weeks ago my daughter filled out their survey and got $5!
jackstraw14 26 days ago [-]
That's so cool, mine was about 30 years ago. I had no idea they were still doing this!
OutlawHusbando 24 days ago [-]
> We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.
Hi! Thanks for letting us know about Firefox Team is being very careful this time, I want to share my idea too because I think the Firefox community have probably tinkered enough to figure out that Tree Styled Tab Group like Sidebery/Tree Style Tab is the best Tab Group implementation, because they're so easy to use, just drag and drop and work great in practice.
I hope you consider making Tree Styled Tab Group an option for vertical tab.
26 days ago [-]
justinclift 26 days ago [-]
> which contributed to it being used only by a relatively small share of our user base.
And that's why telemetry is such a brain dead idea. People then actually make decisions based upon "number of people using feature X" which is incredibly... lets just say "unwise".
1oooqooq 26 days ago [-]
wonder if we should just accept it as "voting" and monitor their telemetry experiment and spam the option we would like
nice find. nobody uses that and sadly it became a desperate support forum which mostly goes ignored
justinclift 26 days ago [-]
Seems like a reasonable idea. With this in place, why are Mozilla using telemetry instead?
1oooqooq 25 days ago [-]
because Mozilla, the foundation, is hostile. it's a political money grab.
with telemetry they can justify whatever. they can go to the board and say "look people are clicking more on pocket, which we put prominently on the UI against everyone wishes, and they barely use bookmarks, which have critical bugs open for over 20years... who would have thought of this counterintuitive insight if it weren't for my genius persistence on trying and measuring new ideas uh? so are we good on the extra bonus to my close childhood friends?" ...see, it makes the pitch defensable, if you don't say the right parts out loud.
justinclift 26 days ago [-]
Might be more accurate. ;)
Vinnl 27 days ago [-]
I think you're referring to Panorama View [1], introduced in Firefox 4 (2010). I think there are still extensions that replicate the experience [2].
There are many things different now that might make it work better this time. If not just that it's 14 years later, different UI, and the pattern being familiar from other browsers, might make a difference too. But no guarantees, of course.
I never understand the need for tab groups, once you get above 4-5 tabs you are actively working in, whats wrong with bookmarks?
KingMob 26 days ago [-]
Bookmarks are perceptually longer-term than open tabs, so there may be more reluctance to save to a bookmark. (E.g., if planning a trip to Italy, do you want to bookmark some blogger's food recs for Rome, forever?)
But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.
miah_ 26 days ago [-]
I wrote love the ability to associate a TTL with bookmarks. Let me bookmark for 3 hours or 2 days or forever. Of course the 3 and 2 are user choices.
Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.
krferriter 26 days ago [-]
This is an interesting idea for a feature, that I think I would like too. I like to save things to maybe look at later and a TTL would manage automatically dropping them from bookmarks in case I never actually want to look at it later.
torstenvl 26 days ago [-]
I add a folder to my bookmark bar. All project related tabs get bookmarked there. When I'm done, I either delete the whole folder or file it somewhere.
I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.
proaralyst 26 days ago [-]
Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or closed together (specific API references that are normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm working on.
Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.
I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups
PrototypeNM1 26 days ago [-]
Think of it like memory hierarchies. Bookmarks are long term storage, tabs are registers. Tab groups fall somewhere in the middle, easy to reengage with and easy to put out of focus.
slightwinder 26 days ago [-]
Bookmarks suck. They are slow and cumbersome to manage, especially when it's many related urls. And for working with them, I need to open them as a tab anyway, so why not stay there from the beginning?
cxr 26 days ago [-]
I use Firefox's existing native support for tab groups that it's had since pre-1.0. They're called windows.
artificialLimbs 26 days ago [-]
Cool until you restart your machine.
cxr 26 days ago [-]
Do you mean "… and then it's not very cool anymore"? And if so, then why not?
jerbear4328 26 days ago [-]
I think they meant that you lose your windows after a reboot, because Firefox only restores one window, compared to all of your groups.
lionelw 25 days ago [-]
Firefox restores all windows.
jay_kyburz 25 days ago [-]
If you close your windows in the wrong order, you will lose your tabs and pinned tabs.
Example: Have a primary window with you email, calendar and important sites pinned.
Then open another window and open a few tabs.
Then at the end of the day, close your primary window first, then discover you still have the secondary window open and close it as well.
When you restart Firefox you will get the secondary window and your "primary" window will be lost with all your pinned tabs.
I actually went down a rabbit hole of trying to log it as a bug, but the behavior is by design apparently.
niutech 12 days ago [-]
Use Ctrl-Shift-Q so that all windows are closed at once.
krageon 23 days ago [-]
You can reopen the window you're missing with ctrl+shift+n, the same way you open a formerly closed tab (only that's not n, that's t). I do agree it's irritating this isn't made more plain.
superkuh 26 days ago [-]
Bookmarks don't have tab history.
josh-sematic 26 days ago [-]
Glad to hear Mozilla is working on adding this. I switched to a chrome-based browser for a while and the only thing I miss after going back to Firefox is tab groups.
BodyCulture 26 days ago [-]
Firefox is the only browser that freezes Ubuntu after some extensive internet use, especially with video watching. Since many years and still today.
1oooqooq 26 days ago [-]
happens to me too. but i would bet money it's because of memory corruption in both of our cases.
i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the default) ram, one crash every couple weeks.
so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non deterministic, it is ram corruption.
BossingAround 26 days ago [-]
I've never used Ubuntu, but on Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed, I've never run into this issue (and I've had like 50+ tabs open for weeks since i don't really reboot my work laptop unless I have to)
csouzaf 26 days ago [-]
I'm not sure how this contributes to the thread. This isn't a technical support forum, so it might not be the best place to discuss specific browser issues.
I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're describing.
Of course, browser performance can be affected by many factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the official Firefox support channels.
codethief 26 days ago [-]
Does it freeze completely (forcing you to resort to kill -9) or is it just slow?
In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever since.
mkesper 26 days ago [-]
Are you using the snap version? I don't doubt that will give a crappy experience.
botanical 25 days ago [-]
I'm on the Firefox snap on Ubuntu but don't get any freezes.
viraptor 27 days ago [-]
> I currently work on tab groups
(It's happening.gif)
But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.
Vinnl 27 days ago [-]
If you're unfamiliar with Sidebery, it's similar to TST but has a neat tab groups feature as well.
Thanks, sideberry looks great. I've defaulted to TST for so long, I haven't looked for alternatives, but it seems worth trying.
NBPEL 26 days ago [-]
Thanks for your replying, it's great to know that you're very open to see what Firefox forks are doing.
And I guess threads like this is a great place to gather user opinions.
I think in this thread, people did talk about Split View a lot (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665), can you talk to the team about this feature ? Considering it's getting a lot of comment, people seem to want it a lot.
Croftengea 26 days ago [-]
Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters. Will the vanilla implementation support it?
dao- 26 days ago [-]
We'll at some point support the tabGroups webextension API, so it would be fairly straightforward for add-ons to do that. We're also looking at automatic grouping options though.
Croftengea 26 days ago [-]
Thank you!
lloydatkinson 26 days ago [-]
What is the hold up on adding Chrome like tab groups with colours and ability to collapse them?
dao- 26 days ago [-]
We're working on that.
methuselah_in 26 days ago [-]
its good to see you giving direct feedback.
1oooqooq 26 days ago [-]
Firefox defaults lately are awful and out of touch...
gestures for reload/back/forward? really?
several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?
a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years?
using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either!
i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead.
so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
downsplat 26 days ago [-]
For Android, I've been using Firefox Beta as my daily driver for over a year, it works flawlessly, and about:config is available.
1oooqooq 26 days ago [-]
yeah, even the very own devs HATE the defaults someone (who?) decided for android.
first there was a non documented setting to remove the blacklist for extensions... when they blocked access to about:config then everyone started using firefox dev... now they removed the block from nightly (i guess using real bleeding edge dev annoyed them)...
anyway, this only proves me point even harder.
slightwinder 26 days ago [-]
> several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?
Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the browser, they probably can work better.
fabrice_d 26 days ago [-]
Not just that, but why would Mozilla pick the winner here? Everyone complains about the side effects of default search engines, let's not do it again with ad-blockers!
And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.
1oooqooq 26 days ago [-]
because that was the original promise with extensions! contribute without the red tape, and if enough people like it, we will incorporate.
heck dev tools started as someone cloning IE dev tool as an extension... there were two... the IE clone and a dalvik debugger... mozilla had no problem picking the winer and incorporating in the official build.
> their google contract
stop normalizing this! they officially denie this arrangement exist! so they cannot use it as an excuse.
1oooqooq 26 days ago [-]
the extension already incorporates a interface to select/finetune/update the rules.
for the past decade updates to the extension itself have been UI only.
yonrg 26 days ago [-]
I'm a firefox-only user, and I read your comment in two ways. It's grumpy, but also on the point! Thanks, I feel similarly. What is your main browser btw?
FF works for me in great ways, and I am highly productive with it, as long as some plugins still work: uBlock, tridactyl, foxyproxy. And for UI: sidebery, stylus.
From time to time I feel I should turn my back towards FF when they come up with new decisions in their UI, which I drastically reduce (no menu, no tabs,...), or new features, which are more disturbing than helping.
On android, I discovered 'kiwi browser' which is FF based but does not blacklist the plugins.
mnmalst 26 days ago [-]
Man you got my hopes up for a bit there since I remembered Kiwi browser was chromium based which after checking, it still is. From there website: "Kiwi is based on Chromium and WebKit." https://kiwibrowser.com/
Vinnl 26 days ago [-]
Note that Firefox for Android no longer explicitly allowlists extensions: anyone can write one that anyone can install.
cma 26 days ago [-]
> several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?
How much less will Google pay to be the default search if this is added?
1oooqooq 26 days ago [-]
but they will never say that out loud ;) so what is the official position? they don't even have one. nobody touch tickets mentioning these things. so sad how open source is so easily coopted.
i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c misdirection, now they don't even pretend.
autoexec 26 days ago [-]
They've automatically added spying by default now too. Mozilla is now an ad-tech company. Don't expect defaults to get any better.
This is the main reason I still use Firefox. Being able to have multiple color-coded containers for my different Azure roles at work, and being able to set a custom socks5 proxy on each container so I can route certain container tabs through a different VPN service.
I'm curious what the use-case of this extension is? Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom protocol handler, and if it's just for my own browser then I'm going to be creating containers and then setting "always open site in this container" and Firefox will always open that site in a specific container. What are you using this for?
mdaniel 26 days ago [-]
> Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom protocol handler
I have my own xdg-open in the PATH which supersedes the /usr/bin one (I believe there actually is a plugin mechanism for xdg-open but I found it easier to just create my own binary than learn their tomfoolery), and with that in mind, I'm able to make any URL routing decisions I'd like via that
> then setting "always open site in this container"
... which won't work for multi-tenant sites like console.aws.amazon.com or portal.azure.com which use cookies or other such nonsense to determine who you are currently logged in as. That's actually true of Google and Microsoft, too, although I have less day-to-day experience with that. I am, of course, aware of the user switcher built into both AWS and Azure consoles, but it's not the same as having a giant red themed container for production accounts versus green for QA ones
As for your specific question, I also use aws-vault to cook federated login URLs for the console because my experience of working with AWS SSO and Okta is some ... it's a lot of clicking ... versus letting aws-vault build the federated signin URL and then launching it into the container named according to its AccountID (so it's easy to programatically dispatch them)
espadrine 26 days ago [-]
Product presentation is a hard-to-develop skill. I agree that many aspects of the page are muddy.
I personally find their compact mode the cleanest I have ever seen. This is the entire window: https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz
To access the address bar, move the mouse to the top, or type Ctrl+L.
For the tabs, move the mouse to the left, or type Ctrl+1, 2… or Ctrl+Tab to cycle through.
I wish Firefox had such a compact mode.
adhamsalama 26 days ago [-]
Sideberry extension does this perfectly.
I migrated from Vivaldi to Firefox because of it.
prometheon1 26 days ago [-]
Same! I switched back from Brave to Firefox last year after discovering that Sidebery has tab panels (which I think Arc calls workspaces) that can be set to use the same Firefox container. I want to be logged into different accounts of the same service, in Brave I had different "profiles" for this, but I like that now in Firefox I can have everything in a single window and I can easily switch between containers by switching to a different panel. (Which I have a hotkey for)
charlie0 26 days ago [-]
Tried Arc and didn't like it. It's main selling point is the workspaces. However, I'm not the type of person to have 200 tabs open at once, so it wasn't as useful for me as I thought it would be. It's def a nice looking app though.
gchamonlive 26 days ago [-]
I might be willing to try it because of these workspaces.
How does It differ from Firefox Profile Manager?
artificialLimbs 26 days ago [-]
With workspaces, I can choose a different workspace (on my Mac) with a right/left swipe of my mouse in the vertical tabs column. It's mind blowingly more productive.
thisislife2 26 days ago [-]
> don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security
And about privacy ...
autoexec 26 days ago [-]
If they commit to keeping all Firefox's spying out of their Firefox-based browsing UI that's all I really need. Firefox was fine, it's just stopped working for its users and respecting their privacy.
26 days ago [-]
ramon156 27 days ago [-]
While I don't condone complaining for the sake of complaining, I really don't see why I would use this.
Every argument feels very "floatey".
When I think of browser devs, I don't think about fancy UI, and blazingly fast speeds! I think about engineers who know what they're talking about.
I've never heard of floorp, and the arguments against librewolf are silly. On top of that, some of these "features" like themes, profile switching are already in FireFox. So again, why would I choose Zen?
I don't see how this project adds any value to the very mature FF, it's just piggybacking imo.
dotancohen 26 days ago [-]
Sometimes (not necessarily here) just a better UI for existing features is enough to make a project succeed.
ZeroGravitas 26 days ago [-]
One relevant example being Firefox, which started in exactly that way. Hiding some features from the overly-featureful Mozilla and focusing on the basic user flow.
Perz1val 26 days ago [-]
The whole thing looks like the "new month, new JS framework" situation
26 days ago [-]
commercialnix 27 days ago [-]
I use Sway (an i3 clone for Wayland), so these "split views" and "workspaces" are not appealing to me.
Zen makes serious claims about performance and sandboxing, but do not forwardly present writings on how they do these things, leaving us with the impression there are some tweaks here and there but not much more.
zamadatix 27 days ago [-]
I'm a Sway user as well but I still find value in features like workspaces, tabs, and split views in certain apps even though they are all also features in Sway. Sometimes a particular split (or any of those other things) can itself be a context I want to switch to in part of my current view. Rather than individually orchestrate that from wherever the components are into my current view it can be nice to define that relation more directly via something like this.
Not saying such features in apps must also be appealing to you as well or anything equally silly, just whether or not they are appealing is more hinged on that base question of whether you like the idea of nested organizational structures than whether or not your window manager has a similar tiling feature.
commercialnix 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
gorgoiler 27 days ago [-]
I’ve been using the sway family of window managers for nearly 20 years! (First ion2, then ion3, then i3, and now sway.) In all this time I’ve briefly used native tabs but mostly now use windows without title bars or any other decorations in split mode all of the time. Most of the day I simply have a terminal running tmux on the first workspace with vim in the first tmux window, shells in the others, and a browser on the second sway workspace.
Would I benefit from using native windows in sway? It often feels like vim splitting, tmux splitting, Firefox tabs, and sway windows are all fighting with against other or at the very least not cooperating when they could be doing a better job if they all deferred to sway. I’m just not sure how to do that well with easy switching between windows and I don’t know if vim even supports it at all unless I use gvim?
granra 27 days ago [-]
I used to also use i3 and later sway and I noticed I only ever tiled my terminals. I don't really remember why but I started using tmux (with tilish) and I liked that I can detach and reattach to sessions later. But at that point I'm just full screening windows so now I'm on gnome and use a single terminal window with tmux :)
Edit: my journey of text editors has been vim -> neovim -> helix so I just have them open inside the tmux sessions.
gorgoiler 27 days ago [-]
Another part of my journey is moving to entirely local development rather than ssh-ing from a $2000 MacBook (running a Linux virtual machine) to a $5000 dev server. I now use native Linux on a $250 mini PC to write my glue code and k8s to hand off all my big compute tasks.
But what that really means is, while ssh-tmux-vim is great when you need it, local UIs could be so much richer, and I would never know because I am still tied to using my local machine as if it were a remote host.
I should stop writing about it and just do something. I have a feeling that using native sway tabs for everything might be fantastic, if I can get over the hump of making the change.
dotancohen 26 days ago [-]
As a very longtime VIM user, can you talk me into helix?
granra 26 days ago [-]
I'm not one for preaching about software :p
I thought I'd miss the infinite extendability of neovim with all my plugins and such but it didn't end up mattering to me and it was quite freeing actually to be just bound to what is supported in the core editor (as long as it's enough for you). I've been waiting for editorconfig support since before switching but it doesn't look like it will be merged into core.
Afaik there's plans to add plugin support using some custom lisp language which I'm excited about (I wrote all my neovim config in fennel).
But overall it's really fast and comes with essentials built-in like LSP and tree sitter support. There's some learning curve coming from vim in terms of key commands and such as helix is inspired by kakoune in that realm.
I don't think I did a really good job at convincing you but that's what came from my head quickly :D
dotancohen 26 days ago [-]
Thanks you! I will take a look. I waited very long to jump to neovim.
bee_rider 26 days ago [-]
Tmux splits are really nice on the server, and getting the server and my local system to be aware of each other is… either very difficult or impossible.
Tmux and vim splits, the competition between them can be a little annoying. Mostly I prefer tmux splits, but the shared yank buffers and ability to link scrolling in vim is really nice.
You can open a terminal in vim somehow IIRC, maybe vim as a multiplexer is the way to true enlightenment, haha.
joshmarinacci 26 days ago [-]
Could you provide some screenshots? I’d love to see what your desktop looks like with this configuration.
commercialnix 27 days ago [-]
I feel like you and I would be friends.
boesboes 27 days ago [-]
No need to be so snarky.
gpvos 27 days ago [-]
What's snarky about that?
ZeroGravitas 26 days ago [-]
I got a weird error when trying to run the app from within the .DMG on ARM Mac, in case anyone who can look into it is reading.
It said "Zen Browser" is damaged and can't be opened, you should reject the disk image.
edit: it's a known thing to do with Apples security, workarounds in step 3 here:
Reading the discussion, I see the developers intend to never sign their OSX package. This is a pretty big red flag for me, shows that the developer isn't really serious about supporting OSX.
Too bad, I was excited by the idea, but this is just unprofessional and I really need to trust my browser.
mariusor 26 days ago [-]
> this is just unprofessional
Or they just prefer to not go out of their way to support the walled garden that is the Apple ecosystem. Principles beat professionalism any day for me.
causal 26 days ago [-]
Then don't claim to support it
mariusor 26 days ago [-]
How would you phrase "we have a version that runs on your platform" then?
26 days ago [-]
SigmundurM 26 days ago [-]
Per their documentation [1], you have to bypass MacOS's gatekeeper.
I hate this about MacOS. It happens seldom enough for me to forget about it and every time I have to search the web for the solution. Thanks for posting the steps.
dartharva 27 days ago [-]
I don't know why but websites always feel downgraded with Firefox and its descendants. Long load times, incomplete/failed loads, bad font rendering, buffering.. It feels evident that webmasters only care for compatibility with Chrome et al.
It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again started breaking on it nowadays.
raffraffraff 27 days ago [-]
I use Firefox on Linux and in general it's fine. Only really dreadful stuff like Microsoft Teams will outright fail. I've found that using NextDNS or an adblocker is more harmful on certain sites. I've had situations where a website completely fails until I change my DNS provider to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or wherever. But I tend to avoid sites like that if I have a choice.
I'm sticking with Firefox. I like the account features (sync, send tab to another device etc) but Firefox's killer feature is container tabs, especially with the add-on for regex URL matching for container selection, and the other add-on that automatically handles AWS SSO accounts.
avazhi 26 days ago [-]
Well at this point for anybody who cares about adblocking Firefox is the only choice, unfortunately.
noisem4ker 27 days ago [-]
I noticed Teams unexpectedly started working in Firefox for me, a few months ago.
tux3 27 days ago [-]
That's terrible. Maybe if you downgrade?
Kokouane 26 days ago [-]
Also important note, but Firefox account settings/sync is End-to-End encrypted, a nice privacy feature compared to the much more invasive Google Account sync.
xolve 27 days ago [-]
> especially with the add-on for regex URL matching for container selection
Which add-on is that? It would be quite helpful.
alje 26 days ago [-]
That is a built-in Firefox container feature. Open a website in a container and then click on the container icon (right next to the search bar) to keep that site open in that container. Every other time, that site loads directly into that container
xolve 26 days ago [-]
Thats per domain, not on any pattern of URL.
raffraffraff 26 days ago [-]
Yep, I think it's called "Containerise" with the British spelling. To make it work you need to remove your existing URL rules from the main container tabs add-on, or they'll fight like cat and dog if there's a conflict.
What's great about regex matching is that you can grab a regex for each of your Google accounts, and bookmark the URL that the regex matches. I've changed the Firefox search bar config to prioritise bookmarks in the results. I can now type 'gmail', and the top two results are:
Gmail (work)
Gmail (personal)
Each opens in opens in the correct container. The trick sometimes is finding a bookmarkable URL with a specific string that you can use in a regex.
To be honest it's one of the features I wish Firefox would add to their add-on because I don't like giving their party add-ons access to my data.
justinclift 26 days ago [-]
Have you seen the thing were Mozilla officially bought an advertising company recently then started adding advertising friendly features near silently?
I use Firefox a lot (and occasionally Chrome), and I haven't had any issues with Firefox. I've been pretty happy with it.
frosting1337 27 days ago [-]
While I agree that develops really only care for Chromium compatability, I've not really noticed any issues with Firefox, except with Google sites every now and then (YouTube in particular).
raffraffraff 27 days ago [-]
Weirdly, I've had to install the full Google Chrome because the Chromium has been problematic. Can't remember details, but I think MS Teams was one example.
dartharva 27 days ago [-]
Yes, Youtube is the main irritant for me as well.
mariusor 27 days ago [-]
When it comes to the websites belonging to the competition, I feel like it's unjust to blame Firefox instead of, in this case, Google.
dartharva 25 days ago [-]
Google is ironically a key sponsor of Firefox.
mrweasel 27 days ago [-]
That might be dependent on use case and which sites you use. I haven't installed Chrome for more than 3 years. Firefox has been my primary browser ever since Opera switched from using Presto, but I kept Chrome as a backup for the longest time. Now I don't needed it anymore. I do have Safari available, but that's mostly for testing.
When your coming directly from Chrome, then maybe you see the problems more? I know I started really disliking Chrome, mostly do to the UI and the developer tools (which is worse that Firefox and much worse than the old Opera, in my opinion).
exusn 27 days ago [-]
Font rendering does feel much worse on macOS, but on Windows you can tweak the cleartype parameters a bit and get it closer to Edge/Chrome.
As web developers it is our moral and ethical duty to use Firefox / any non chromium browsers because we truly understand the problem of one company controlling the web.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 27 days ago [-]
Same problem, to the point that I started testing alternative browsers that are chromium based. Currently using Brave, I couldn't find better alternatives that worked on linux, windows and Android.
It's shocking that there isn't a decent chromium based browser that supports extensions on android.
Kokouane 26 days ago [-]
There is an app called Kiwi Browser that does support extensions on Android. The issue becomes no sync, which I think is also a feature you are looking for.
It makes sense that Chrome has never built it, have to keep the users from using Adblock.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 26 days ago [-]
I'm aware of Kiwi, but it lags for months to a year behind chromium updates, which is very dangerous.
Chrome for sure, I was surprised that also any other browser (Via, Soul, Brave, vivaldi) don't support extensions.
I'm on Brave now because while it does not support ublock origin, the adblocker is stronger than the others I tried and works similarly. It also has some sort of builtin sponsorblock, so I use it on the phone over Firefox which is slow.
jmprspret 27 days ago [-]
Fonts do always look way better on Chrome. I can't explain it.
widdershins 27 days ago [-]
It's just familiarity. I use Firefox on macOS and I always think the fonts look fuzzy on Chrome when I'm occasionally forced to use it. I spent a few weeks on Arc (Chrome-based) earlier this year, got used to the fonts, and then they looked a bit weird when I came back to Firefox.
seabrookmx 27 days ago [-]
+1
I hate the Chrome fonts for this reason.
I'm surprised Mac users are noticing a difference though, I find the difference basically vanishes on really high res displays (like my QHD-ish panel on my Framework 13).
pjerem 27 days ago [-]
Pixels aren’t noticeable anymore in such resolutions but font rendering and anti aliasing may still impact perceived contrast and crispness.
Though, on such displays, disabling AA totally is a viable option but it will still feel different.
pjerem 27 days ago [-]
Interesting, font rendering is the number one thing that makes me hate Electron apps (I have so much more reasons to hate Chrome).
It’s to the point that I just can’t use, say, VS Code on a monitor that is not Hi-DPI.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the font doesn’t look better. Maybe it’s aesthetically more pleasing but to me, it’s just harder to read.
I have multiple eye issues that may not help and which make me more demanding but since I don’t have this issue with OS rendered fonts, I consider this to be an issue.
Slack video chat works only in Chrome. As in, they explicitly check for non-Chrome browsers and say “Nope. We won’t even let you try”.
When I saw that, I thought, “Yep. We’ve come full-circle.” Chrome really is the new IE.
Zyten 27 days ago [-]
I had the most issues with sites like YouTube, where I‘m not surprised that Chrome based browsers run better. However, I recently also had issues with Sony, where the login page would error out every single time with Safari and Firefox. Chromium worked just fine.
I honestly do not understand why there’s this little testing being done. Yeah, Chrome is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that other browsers should not be used or don’t exist. It‘s actively harming users. In our software development projects (HPC software), we deliberately test with all compilers available on HPC systems, just to ensure that nothing breaks…
jszymborski 27 days ago [-]
This website mentions LibreWolf which I've recently switched to. It's truly great. Takes care of all the decrapification I do to a fresh FF install while keeping up with the upstream security updates. Feels like how FF should feel imho.
mrweasel 26 days ago [-]
Someone pointed out to me that you can set eBay as the default search engine. That seems like a weird option. There can't be many that primarily uses their browser to access eBay, though I wouldn't rule out that people with this preference exists.
nyanpasu64 26 days ago [-]
Stock Firefox also allows setting Amazon and eBay as a default search engine, and I wonder if this is related to Amazon being a sponsored shortcut on the new tab page.
autoexec 26 days ago [-]
I wish you could just set the default search engine to "none". I just disable it eventually anyway, but it still leaves a bunch of garbage behind, like having "Search <whatever> for <blah blah blah>" in the context menu.
biugbkifcjk 26 days ago [-]
Maybe they get some royalties by having it as an option?
0x2a 27 days ago [-]
Looks like it supports Firefox extensions such as uBlock Origin as well. Surprised the website didn't mention it.
I mean, it's a firefox-based browser. Is there any reason why it wouldn't support firefox extensions?
0x2a 26 days ago [-]
I thought it might be similar to Orion based on the submission title, but it looks like a rebranded Firefox (which is great). This is what Mozilla should be doing.
willi59549879 27 days ago [-]
I quite like the zen browser. It is privacy focused but also visually appealing.
The feature that I like best, is that the browser does not take up a lot of space for itself. Even the top bar can be hidden. That way most of the screen is there to show the website.
wmstack 27 days ago [-]
This is the information I was looking for. Does it have the Arc style search box/dialog/palette that pops up when you need it?
willi59549879 26 days ago [-]
there is no search button. but you can search in the url bar, which will show you a button to switch to the corresponding tab
hysan 27 days ago [-]
Seems… quite lacking in details? It makes some pretty bold claims but doesn’t explain how it achieves things like better performance. Their docs are also pretty empty.
dao- 27 days ago [-]
Here are Firefox about:config preferences they tweak for performance:
The website is so bare, I'd like to see a list with all the major features and some screenshots before downloading anything.
tcsenpai 27 days ago [-]
I used Arc a lot back when I used MacOS. Was definitely a pleasing experience.
I missed it a lot since I switched to Linux/Firefox.
I just set up Zen with all my extensions and bookmarks, it behaves very well: let's see if it stands the trial of time, but very nice work. I like the UI
adhamsalama 26 days ago [-]
Have you tried the Sideberry extension?
tcsenpai 26 days ago [-]
Nope. I see it is a vertical tab extension: will try it!
Sadly didnt run for me on Windows on this Arm laptop although in mitigation I didnt try that hard & was in a hurry. I might have another look at it later. Uninstalled for now.
Hard_Space 27 days ago [-]
Does anyone know if Zen identifies itself as 'Firefox' at program-level when running on Windows? This is the biggest mistake that FF forks and offshoots make, since it makes it impossible to run Firefox and the derivative work at the same time.
jeremiahlee 26 days ago [-]
Just tested with Zen v1.0.0-a.26. User agent reports:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
Exact match with Firefox v129.0.1:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
ReadCarlBarks 26 days ago [-]
He's not asking about the User-Agent string sent to websites.
He's asking about how the browser identifies itself to the Windows operating system. According to him, other forks say simply "Firefox," which makes it impossible to run them alongside the official Firefox release.
autoexec 26 days ago [-]
Shouldn't be a problem if you use the portable version of one (or even both if that's an option).
maelito 27 days ago [-]
Firefox's container addon is one of the features that make me love firefox. But they could be integrated better.
I'll try Zen.
anon23432343 26 days ago [-]
One thing almost all arc clones dont get right and I talked with other arc users about this is that arc when surfing has no ui besides the border no top bar not tabs you can hide everything if you want to.
I downloaded Zen and what do i see a top bar which I can not hide or at least I can not find how to do it.
joshjob42 26 days ago [-]
Activate Compact Mode in the settings.
anon23432343 26 days ago [-]
Okay I found it but its wanky at best. how do i show the topbar once its gone?
I get that this ia an alpha but yeah going back to arc feels much smoother
bpbp-mango 27 days ago [-]
Split tab is cool.
Couldn't import data from firefox.
Quite slow to launch.
Profiles are buggy, the name gets lost and it keeps launching the welcome wizard.
looking forward to seeing this mature
gsimons88 27 days ago [-]
Does anybody have insight into how this compares to Brave? In their own comparison Brave is not even considerd.
mrweasel 27 days ago [-]
> In their own comparison Brave is not even considerd
If their target audience is disgruntled Firefox users that makes a ton of sense. I would not consider replacing Firefox with a browser based on Chrome/Chromium. It's not that I think it a bad rendering engine, it not, but I don't like the mono-culture that has been promoted and would like to avoid contributing to it, if I can.
netbioserror 26 days ago [-]
I still don't understand this "browser engine monopoly" argument. Engines are the most difficult part to build and coordinate around. WebKit is open source and gets contributions from across the industry. It would make sense for most people to coalesce around that single target. The browsers built around the engine are the feature-filled interfaces people care about and where competition should happen. The engine has no opinions about tracking or tabs or built-in services. As soon as we argue we need unique engines, there are now multiple competing standards for developers to target. In fact, I'd bet that future engines that cite issues with WebKit as their motivation for a fork or a from-scratch rewrite will start using the tagline "WebKit-compatible" because that standard is so important.
DHPersonal 26 days ago [-]
The issue with a single browser having dominance is that the largest contributor to that project doesn’t just control the project, they control the Web.
mrweasel 26 days ago [-]
> It would make sense for most people to coalesce around that single target
No it wouldn't. Even the OpenSSH project has states that they'd prefer that more SSH implementation where around, due to security concerns. Bugs in OpenSSL where/are a serious issue, because of it was almost a monopoly until HeartBleed.
Having a single rendering engine be 95% of the market is not a good option in terms of overall security for the internet.
The rendering engine in Chrome is Blink, which is a fork of WebKit. Safari, GNOME Web and DuckDuckGos macOS browser still uses WebKit. Blink and WebKit is going to share some of the same issues, as they come from the same codebase, but they are two separate rendering engines at this point.
Kokouane 27 days ago [-]
They only compared to Firefox-based browsers which does make sense. Most people are already firmly on one side of the Chromium vs FF engine debate.
Compared to Brave in what terms? Speed, not sure, but Chromium is known to be better. As far as I know, Brave doesn't allow split tabs or workspaces though.
NayamAmarshe 27 days ago [-]
Brave now has split tabs in the latest nightly iirc.
Not sure about workspaces, is it like profiles?
Perz1val 26 days ago [-]
Seems like workspaces are just a different UI for tab grouping, some ppl may prefer it. For me both are usable, but both are just a partial remedy for people that keep too much tabs opened
redkoala 27 days ago [-]
Vertical tabs and privacy focused implementation gives me a good combination between the Arc browsing experience and the privacy protections that Mullvad browser (or private mode Firefox) deliver.
willi59549879 27 days ago [-]
I was very surprised with selection if the search engine after install. None of the browsers I tried do that. I quite like the vertical tabs also the browser is visually appealing
danpalmer 27 days ago [-]
Yeah I'm keen to try Zen to see if they've nailed the tab/workspace UX in the way that Arc has. I don't like Arc's decline into slow AI features and growth hacks, but some of the core functionality is really nice.
bityard 27 days ago [-]
Seems like the features they promote on the marketing page are ones that Vivaldi has had for quite some time. I'll probably give it a try but when I gave up on Firefox, one of the main reasons was that many of the sites I visit aren't tested on Firefox due to the low market share and are broken in subtle ways.
getcrunk 27 days ago [-]
Like what? Aside from google and Apple being actively hostile to Firefox I rarely have issues
Yeri 27 days ago [-]
100% and if I have issues it's an extension (like ublock or privacy badger)
dimator 27 days ago [-]
These two are the culprits every time a page has issues on Firefox for me.
Every time I see a question like this on HN, the answer can be found out with minimal effort. If you want to recommend some relevant alternative you use, just be honest and say that. If you really want to know, it would be reasonable to spend twenty seconds on the page, there’s a comparison table.
nusl 27 days ago [-]
You can determine this yourself quite quickly by visiting each site and comparing them.
stackghost 27 days ago [-]
I suppose it doesn't have a name I'd be embarrassed to tell my grandmother about.
bionsystem 27 days ago [-]
All of those are features I love in Vivaldi. If it matures it will be a very welcome open source replacement.
aezart 26 days ago [-]
I've been looking for a Vivaldi replacement as well, due to the looming manifest v3 stuff. Hopefully this, or another project like it, works out.
adhamsalama 23 days ago [-]
Try Firefox with the Sideberry extension.
PikachuEXE 27 days ago [-]
I use Vivaldi too. Will try this one out to see how it compared to Firefox
Firefox with some extras might he nice, but the structure of that web page raises the question:
Who is the target audience? That website has so many oversimplified marketing claims that are about security and customization. It seems wholly undecided if the target audience is people who fall for buzz words or someone actually interested in quantitative improvements over Firefox.
And yet the comparison is just checkboxes and not even including base Firefox. How about bar graphs for comparison and some actual pictures of the advertised customization, layout and workspaces?
To me this still feels a little shady, even though the features seem nice.
Mashimo 27 days ago [-]
> Optimized for peak performance
What does that even mean?
Alifatisk 26 days ago [-]
I interpret that as they have tweaked the configurations with the performance in mind, meaning their goal when customizing the browser has been to get as much juice as possible out of the browser.
MrAlex94 26 days ago [-]
Realistically, compiler flags and config flags have had diminishing returns on Firefox builds for a few years now. Mozilla are very quick to update the toolchain now, compared to before as well as taking care of curated CPU-dispatch where necessary.
sirodoht 27 days ago [-]
macOS says "“Zen Browser.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Bin." :(
weikju 27 days ago [-]
Probably isn't notarized. Right-click the app and open, or use the terminal:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app
edit: turns out they are describing this process here from a link on the macos download page:
The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately, perhaps it needs a better title.
Also while I understand some people have moral objections to the 100 dollar/euro registration fee, clearly a lot more than that has been spent in time to get the application to this stage, almost all apps for macOS distributing like this are notarized now, and with such a slick marketing page it just feels weird to then not spend a relatively small amount of money to make this immediately far more accessible. The instructions aren't hard to follow, but still make trying it out 10-100x harder.
Also it's tricky to get donations for something that literally prevents people using the application, no one is going to donate for the registration fee before even trying it, and once they've gotten through the installation process there's no incentive to donate for that anymore.
tadfisher 27 days ago [-]
To be fair, requiring the developer 100/eur per year in perpetuity to avoid a dialog literally telling the user to drag the app into the Trash feels a lot like extortion.
devjab 27 days ago [-]
I don’t think anyone should pay Apple to notarize their applications to be honest. It’s basically extortion that you need both a running $99 subscription and a MacBook of some sort to complete the process. I understand why big companies will do so, but for OSS projects it frankly should cost anything. I do wonder if the process would stick if companies like Google and Microsoft refused to do it though they obviously won’t.
That being said, I’m sure a lot of OSS projects are willing to accept it if you personally chose to pay the fee.
zamadatix 27 days ago [-]
At this point the browser isn't even beta on a single platform, I don't think making it easy to install on macOS is really a pressing priority to expect developers to drop money on in hopes of growth quite yet.
whywhywhywhy 26 days ago [-]
I’ll pay it when they just fully block software that doesn’t pay.
Until then as they escalate their extortion dialogs I’ll just normalize instructions on how to run dodgy looking shell scripts that bypass them on software I release for free.
weikju 27 days ago [-]
> The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately, perhaps it needs a better title.
yes I found that awkward as well
rchaud 26 days ago [-]
If you are downloading a new browser app in 2024, it's a fair bet that you know how to get around MacOS' nanny state policies around un-notarized apps.
I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up!
My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact: it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's great.
I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.
For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.
Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.
There's a BIG difference between tracking and metrics, but they are often treated the same, especially by "power users".
And there's no way for a user to validate that any tracking is indeed anonymous. The technical level needed to asses this is just... out of reach for everyone (the quantity of people who can properly verify this is small enough we can safely ignore it when speaking generally and use the coloquialism Everyone)
To you and I there is a difference between tracking and metrics. To everyone else there is none. All my Mom knows is that the software dialed home. It is impossible to verify what it said to the mothership. The popup promised "Metrics only!" but then Little Snitch lit up like a Christmas tree 4 times! It's stealing my info!
How does the consumer know that the "metrics" didn't include home IP, OS version, and god knows whatever else? Again, metrics are a subset of data. Even the internet request to ship a fully anonymized usage info like "saved_files: 10, opened_files: 11" metric set contains Gobs and Gobs of identifiable information on and around the request itself. Does the company stash inbound request data for troubleshooting? That's fucking tracking bro. Your data dog instance is chock-full of tracking info.
It is not reasonable to expect end-users to be able to verify the claim that "only metrics are tracked". It is safer for everyone to assume this is a bald-faced lie, because at the end of the day it is impossible to verify to any level of certainty.
A terrible way to get them to stop doing something you don't personally agree with is by starting your post with a bad idea, support it with a lie and close it with a personal attack.
And why wouldn't it be Nielsen :) I remember when they sent me cash in the mail as a kid, fun times.
Hi! Thanks for letting us know about Firefox Team is being very careful this time, I want to share my idea too because I think the Firefox community have probably tinkered enough to figure out that Tree Styled Tab Group like Sidebery/Tree Style Tab is the best Tab Group implementation, because they're so easy to use, just drag and drop and work great in practice.
I hope you consider making Tree Styled Tab Group an option for vertical tab.
And that's why telemetry is such a brain dead idea. People then actually make decisions based upon "number of people using feature X" which is incredibly... lets just say "unwise".
with telemetry they can justify whatever. they can go to the board and say "look people are clicking more on pocket, which we put prominently on the UI against everyone wishes, and they barely use bookmarks, which have critical bugs open for over 20years... who would have thought of this counterintuitive insight if it weren't for my genius persistence on trying and measuring new ideas uh? so are we good on the extra bonus to my close childhood friends?" ...see, it makes the pitch defensable, if you don't say the right parts out loud.
There are many things different now that might make it work better this time. If not just that it's 14 years later, different UI, and the pattern being familiar from other browsers, might make a difference too. But no guarantees, of course.
(Note: I don't work on Tab Groups.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110613070035/http://www.azaras...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ is widely used, but I'm not sure if it does the overview. Other extensions do.
But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.
Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.
I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.
Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.
I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups
Example: Have a primary window with you email, calendar and important sites pinned.
Then open another window and open a few tabs.
Then at the end of the day, close your primary window first, then discover you still have the secondary window open and close it as well.
When you restart Firefox you will get the secondary window and your "primary" window will be lost with all your pinned tabs.
I actually went down a rabbit hole of trying to log it as a bug, but the behavior is by design apparently.
i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the default) ram, one crash every couple weeks.
so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non deterministic, it is ram corruption.
I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're describing.
Of course, browser performance can be affected by many factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the official Firefox support channels.
In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever since.
(It's happening.gif)
But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.
Speaking of, there are other cool new features coming to Firefox - such as vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
And I guess threads like this is a great place to gather user opinions.
I think in this thread, people did talk about Split View a lot (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665), can you talk to the team about this feature ? Considering it's getting a lot of comment, people seem to want it a lot.
gestures for reload/back/forward? really?
several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?
a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years?
using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either!
i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead.
so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
first there was a non documented setting to remove the blacklist for extensions... when they blocked access to about:config then everyone started using firefox dev... now they removed the block from nightly (i guess using real bleeding edge dev annoyed them)...
anyway, this only proves me point even harder.
Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the browser, they probably can work better.
And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.
heck dev tools started as someone cloning IE dev tool as an extension... there were two... the IE clone and a dalvik debugger... mozilla had no problem picking the winer and incorporating in the official build.
> their google contract
stop normalizing this! they officially denie this arrangement exist! so they cannot use it as an excuse.
for the past decade updates to the extension itself have been UI only.
FF works for me in great ways, and I am highly productive with it, as long as some plugins still work: uBlock, tridactyl, foxyproxy. And for UI: sidebery, stylus.
From time to time I feel I should turn my back towards FF when they come up with new decisions in their UI, which I drastically reduce (no menu, no tabs,...), or new features, which are more disturbing than helping.
On android, I discovered 'kiwi browser' which is FF based but does not blacklist the plugins.
How much less will Google pay to be the default search if this is added?
i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c misdirection, now they don't even pretend.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
This is official supported add-on
I have my own xdg-open in the PATH which supersedes the /usr/bin one (I believe there actually is a plugin mechanism for xdg-open but I found it easier to just create my own binary than learn their tomfoolery), and with that in mind, I'm able to make any URL routing decisions I'd like via that
> then setting "always open site in this container"
... which won't work for multi-tenant sites like console.aws.amazon.com or portal.azure.com which use cookies or other such nonsense to determine who you are currently logged in as. That's actually true of Google and Microsoft, too, although I have less day-to-day experience with that. I am, of course, aware of the user switcher built into both AWS and Azure consoles, but it's not the same as having a giant red themed container for production accounts versus green for QA ones
As for your specific question, I also use aws-vault to cook federated login URLs for the console because my experience of working with AWS SSO and Okta is some ... it's a lot of clicking ... versus letting aws-vault build the federated signin URL and then launching it into the container named according to its AccountID (so it's easy to programatically dispatch them)
I personally find their compact mode the cleanest I have ever seen. This is the entire window: https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz To access the address bar, move the mouse to the top, or type Ctrl+L. For the tabs, move the mouse to the left, or type Ctrl+1, 2… or Ctrl+Tab to cycle through.
I wish Firefox had such a compact mode.
How does It differ from Firefox Profile Manager?
And about privacy ...
When I think of browser devs, I don't think about fancy UI, and blazingly fast speeds! I think about engineers who know what they're talking about.
I've never heard of floorp, and the arguments against librewolf are silly. On top of that, some of these "features" like themes, profile switching are already in FireFox. So again, why would I choose Zen?
I don't see how this project adds any value to the very mature FF, it's just piggybacking imo.
Zen makes serious claims about performance and sandboxing, but do not forwardly present writings on how they do these things, leaving us with the impression there are some tweaks here and there but not much more.
Not saying such features in apps must also be appealing to you as well or anything equally silly, just whether or not they are appealing is more hinged on that base question of whether you like the idea of nested organizational structures than whether or not your window manager has a similar tiling feature.
Would I benefit from using native windows in sway? It often feels like vim splitting, tmux splitting, Firefox tabs, and sway windows are all fighting with against other or at the very least not cooperating when they could be doing a better job if they all deferred to sway. I’m just not sure how to do that well with easy switching between windows and I don’t know if vim even supports it at all unless I use gvim?
Edit: my journey of text editors has been vim -> neovim -> helix so I just have them open inside the tmux sessions.
But what that really means is, while ssh-tmux-vim is great when you need it, local UIs could be so much richer, and I would never know because I am still tied to using my local machine as if it were a remote host.
I should stop writing about it and just do something. I have a feeling that using native sway tabs for everything might be fantastic, if I can get over the hump of making the change.
I thought I'd miss the infinite extendability of neovim with all my plugins and such but it didn't end up mattering to me and it was quite freeing actually to be just bound to what is supported in the core editor (as long as it's enough for you). I've been waiting for editorconfig support since before switching but it doesn't look like it will be merged into core.
Afaik there's plans to add plugin support using some custom lisp language which I'm excited about (I wrote all my neovim config in fennel).
But overall it's really fast and comes with essentials built-in like LSP and tree sitter support. There's some learning curve coming from vim in terms of key commands and such as helix is inspired by kakoune in that realm.
I don't think I did a really good job at convincing you but that's what came from my head quickly :D
Tmux and vim splits, the competition between them can be a little annoying. Mostly I prefer tmux splits, but the shared yank buffers and ability to link scrolling in vim is really nice.
You can open a terminal in vim somehow IIRC, maybe vim as a multiplexer is the way to true enlightenment, haha.
It said "Zen Browser" is damaged and can't be opened, you should reject the disk image.
edit: it's a known thing to do with Apples security, workarounds in step 3 here:
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53
Too bad, I was excited by the idea, but this is just unprofessional and I really need to trust my browser.
Or they just prefer to not go out of their way to support the walled garden that is the Apple ecosystem. Principles beat professionalism any day for me.
[1]: https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/install-macos#step-3-byp...
It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again started breaking on it nowadays.
I'm sticking with Firefox. I like the account features (sync, send tab to another device etc) but Firefox's killer feature is container tabs, especially with the add-on for regex URL matching for container selection, and the other add-on that automatically handles AWS SSO accounts.
Which add-on is that? It would be quite helpful.
What's great about regex matching is that you can grab a regex for each of your Google accounts, and bookmark the URL that the regex matches. I've changed the Firefox search bar config to prioritise bookmarks in the results. I can now type 'gmail', and the top two results are:
Gmail (work)
Gmail (personal)
Each opens in opens in the correct container. The trick sometimes is finding a bookmarkable URL with a specific string that you can use in a regex.
To be honest it's one of the features I wish Firefox would add to their add-on because I don't like giving their party add-ons access to my data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40842808
When your coming directly from Chrome, then maybe you see the problems more? I know I started really disliking Chrome, mostly do to the UI and the developer tools (which is worse that Firefox and much worse than the old Opera, in my opinion).
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/404408660a4d976e2a...
It's shocking that there isn't a decent chromium based browser that supports extensions on android.
It makes sense that Chrome has never built it, have to keep the users from using Adblock.
Chrome for sure, I was surprised that also any other browser (Via, Soul, Brave, vivaldi) don't support extensions.
I'm on Brave now because while it does not support ublock origin, the adblocker is stronger than the others I tried and works similarly. It also has some sort of builtin sponsorblock, so I use it on the phone over Firefox which is slow.
I hate the Chrome fonts for this reason.
I'm surprised Mac users are noticing a difference though, I find the difference basically vanishes on really high res displays (like my QHD-ish panel on my Framework 13).
Though, on such displays, disabling AA totally is a viable option but it will still feel different.
It’s to the point that I just can’t use, say, VS Code on a monitor that is not Hi-DPI.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the font doesn’t look better. Maybe it’s aesthetically more pleasing but to me, it’s just harder to read.
I have multiple eye issues that may not help and which make me more demanding but since I don’t have this issue with OS rendered fonts, I consider this to be an issue.
When I saw that, I thought, “Yep. We’ve come full-circle.” Chrome really is the new IE.
I honestly do not understand why there’s this little testing being done. Yeah, Chrome is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that other browsers should not be used or don’t exist. It‘s actively harming users. In our software development projects (HPC software), we deliberately test with all compilers available on HPC systems, just to ensure that nothing breaks…
Wonder if this still applies:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...
I also found this somewhat funny:
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...Exact match with Firefox v129.0.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
He's asking about how the browser identifies itself to the Windows operating system. According to him, other forks say simply "Firefox," which makes it impossible to run them alongside the official Firefox release.
I'll try Zen.
I downloaded Zen and what do i see a top bar which I can not hide or at least I can not find how to do it.
I get that this ia an alpha but yeah going back to arc feels much smoother
looking forward to seeing this mature
If their target audience is disgruntled Firefox users that makes a ton of sense. I would not consider replacing Firefox with a browser based on Chrome/Chromium. It's not that I think it a bad rendering engine, it not, but I don't like the mono-culture that has been promoted and would like to avoid contributing to it, if I can.
No it wouldn't. Even the OpenSSH project has states that they'd prefer that more SSH implementation where around, due to security concerns. Bugs in OpenSSL where/are a serious issue, because of it was almost a monopoly until HeartBleed.
Having a single rendering engine be 95% of the market is not a good option in terms of overall security for the internet.
The rendering engine in Chrome is Blink, which is a fork of WebKit. Safari, GNOME Web and DuckDuckGos macOS browser still uses WebKit. Blink and WebKit is going to share some of the same issues, as they come from the same codebase, but they are two separate rendering engines at this point.
Compared to Brave in what terms? Speed, not sure, but Chromium is known to be better. As far as I know, Brave doesn't allow split tabs or workspaces though.
Not sure about workspaces, is it like profiles?
Who is the target audience? That website has so many oversimplified marketing claims that are about security and customization. It seems wholly undecided if the target audience is people who fall for buzz words or someone actually interested in quantitative improvements over Firefox.
And yet the comparison is just checkboxes and not even including base Firefox. How about bar graphs for comparison and some actual pictures of the advertised customization, layout and workspaces?
To me this still feels a little shady, even though the features seem nice.
What does that even mean?
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app
edit: turns out they are describing this process here from a link on the macos download page:
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53
Also while I understand some people have moral objections to the 100 dollar/euro registration fee, clearly a lot more than that has been spent in time to get the application to this stage, almost all apps for macOS distributing like this are notarized now, and with such a slick marketing page it just feels weird to then not spend a relatively small amount of money to make this immediately far more accessible. The instructions aren't hard to follow, but still make trying it out 10-100x harder.
Also it's tricky to get donations for something that literally prevents people using the application, no one is going to donate for the registration fee before even trying it, and once they've gotten through the installation process there's no incentive to donate for that anymore.
That being said, I’m sure a lot of OSS projects are willing to accept it if you personally chose to pay the fee.
Until then as they escalate their extortion dialogs I’ll just normalize instructions on how to run dodgy looking shell scripts that bypass them on software I release for free.
yes I found that awkward as well
1:(As in the pre Chrome meaning of the word)
Reddit launch of the project about 4 months ago.
Fantastic project and already very polished browser. Really enjoying it!