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This + moving SSL certificate details dialog hidden away into devtools + no way to disable NaCl + chrome 56 auto-re-enabling flash and widevine on every launch

by 0x0 10y ago

This + moving SSL certificate details dialog hidden away into devtools + no way to disable NaCl + chrome 56 auto-re-enabling flash and widevine on every launch (which shows a click-to-enable-flash everywhere chrome55 would just use a html5 video player) + the upcoming background tab throttling means I'll be seriously reconsidering firefox or safari before the next Chrome release :-/

malikNF 10y ago
I have actually started using firefox again recently, chrome has lost me due to how hard they (and Google as a company) are trying to push things on to people. Anyways, I am in love with the nightly build of ff and everyone should honestly give it atleast a week of their time to try it. The developer edition and the nightly build have some really interesting features for development out of the box and honestly helps make work easier. You do run in to the occasional error or two but for pre-release versions they are seriously stable. p.s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163 (Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014))
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  One thing to note - Nightly is compiled with certain debugging flags enabled, whereas Developer Edition is not. There is a slight performance hit, which is not always noticeable, but I mention it in case anybody tries Nightly and finds it slow.
  - johnp_ 10y ago
    It should be noted that some of those features can be disabled via environment variables: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Benchmarking https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Benchmarking Specifically, I use those environment variables: JS_OPTION_USE_UNBOXED_ARRAYS=1 JSGC_DISABLE_POISONING=1 There's at least one other thing (async stack) that I'm aware of that may be tunable: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280819 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280819 edit: just figured out that that's "javascript.options.asyncstack", so I set it to disabled on nightly too. Fwiw, the unboxed objects bug is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1153266 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1153266 edit: typedobj performance improvements visible at the bottom of https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=misc https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=mi... edit: removed MOZ_QUIET=1, as a source inspection reveals that it is only compiled #ifdef DEBUG.
- hunterwerlla 10y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I got sick of chrome's annoying scaling problems and switched back to firefox after many years. I like that firefox actually gives you a choice about everything, unlike chrome (flash will never touch my system ever again). Additionally, nightly is smoother than chrome for me. Once the nightly improvements hit stable, I'm going to start recommending Firefox to my non tech savy family members again.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    If you're going to start recommending software and hardware to your friends and family then please support them when they run into problems and help them revert to their original choice when they decide to switch back.
- neurostimulant 10y ago
  I also decided to use Firefox again recently. There are some slight annoyances, but this time instead of complaining about it I decided to get the source code and tinker with it. Building Firefox from source is surprisingly very easy. I think Mozilla did a great job making the source code and the build process accessible for developers not familiar with Firefox internals like me.
- zbraniecki 10y ago
  Hi all. Just wanted to tell you that a lot of people working on Firefox are here and we really appreciate your word of mouth support and feedback. This year is going to be huge for us as we're wrapping up the part about reducing technical debt and start gearing toward using our new superpowers to innovate. We need your help to stay relevant (market share), improve quality (report bugs, write test cases), and improve (lots of code in Firefox is easy to hack on as we move a lot of UI to HTML/JS - like devtools).
  - Chirael 10y ago
    This is great to read/hear. I'll put my vote in for two things. 1) Performance, performance, performance; this is what originally caused me to use Chrome a lot more, the perception of quick-to-open tabs and snappy responsiveness. 2) Privacy; this is something Google almost by definition can't compete on, because their business model depends on providing something free in exchange for user data (the opposite of privacy). A third important consideration of course is "not crashing" or at least if there is a crash, containing it to the offending tab - this is why I'm very happy to read about the progress of multi-process Firefox! Keep up the great work guys.
    - smw 10y ago
      My only serious problem with firefox is that a single tab can lock up the entire application. Otherwise, the performance _and_ memory usage is fantastic. But that one issue is enough to keep me away from it most of the time.
      - cpeterso 10y ago
        Multiple tab processes (aka "e10s-multi") should be shipping in Firefox 54 (now in the Firefox Nightly channel). The initial rollout of multi-process Firefox ("e10s") had one process for the browser UI and one process for all tabs (and a separate process for sandboxing Flash), so one bad tab could lock up all your tabs but your browser UI would still be responsive so you could close the bad tab. e10s-multi will increase the number of shared tab processes to two or more, balancing tab isolation vs memory overhead. In the meantime, you can test more tab processes by increasing the "dom.ipc.processCount" pref in about:config. I set my process count limit to 999. :)
- Esau 10y ago
  Chrome is run by a company that collects and sells the personal information of its users for advertising. Everyone needs to be weary of it. That said, Mozilla has also made some bone-headed decisions. Integrating Pocket, forcing a chat client, and advertising tiles really turned me off.
  - angryasian 10y ago
    please explain how they sell personal information, as far as I know.. they allow companies to target attributes in aggregate and you may see an ad based on your behaviors. No company actually receives your personal information
    - ams6110 10y ago
      > No company actually receives your personal information Google receives it.
      - angryasian 10y ago
        so they aren't selling it
        malikNF 10y ago
        Yes they are, they are offering the information they have about their users to their advertisers. If its bad or good is a debate for another time. But the fact is you are the product, your information is the product they are selling.
        mda 10y ago
        What kind of information do they offer to advertisers?
        niutech 10y ago
        Citation from Google: "We try to show you useful ads by using data collected from your devices, including your searches and location, websites and apps you have used, videos and ads you have seen, and personal information you have given us, such as your age range, gender, and topics of interest."
- rb666 10y ago
  You made me reinstall FF Nightly after some years of using Chrome. Must say, the speed is so much better than it used to be. I think I will try switch to FF entirely.
- 9248 10y ago
  I really wish I could use Firefox! But I gave up after trying repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to force-enable hardware acceleration and bypass their 'video card blacklist'. From what I understand they check driver versions in a couple places on Windows, and disable hw acc. if the version is lower than X, or the versions they get, say from registry and dll's, are different, mismatch. Thing is, the matter is quite complicated on dual-gpu laptops (intel+dedicated) since manufacturers give us all kinds of custom drivers. Firefox will try to find a driver version, it won't find anything from Intel or AMD/NVidia, and it will default to software rendering. As a user I don't have the luxury to simply 'Update my graphics drivers', I have to live with whatever custom software I got from the manufacturer.
  - zbraniecki 10y ago
    please, report the bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org and describe your problem. Thank you!
RodericDay 10y ago
This kinda post reminds of these posts decrying how bad things are with x and a threat to do y, eg: move to Canada. And the punchline is always a soggy: "I'm seriously reconsidering". Post would be much more effective if you just switched already, and discussed your experience having done so.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  It's hard to reconsider firefox or safari because they are also very much anti-user. Maybe a fork of firefox/chromium without all that anti-user stuff would be better, with plugins only click-to-play, with no autoplay for animations, with a quick way to toggle javascript in a tab, etc. But there is no such fork.
  - hashhar 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on some anti-user stuff that Firefox and Safari do? I'd like to know. I do consider Firefox comparatively more open than Chrome though, so I may have my biases.
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      Not OP, but I tried both FF and Safari recently hoping they would reduce the footprint. FF ended up being way too slow. I stopped using Safari after a few minutes because they decided to not show favicons on tabs anymore and you can't enable it at all. How is anybody supposed to find the right one of the 15-20 tabs that are open. Insanity!
      - rickycook 10y ago
        i agree; no tab favicons is upsetting. they do come back if you pin tabs (so only the icon is visible), and i'd say apple wants you to do the "zoom out beyond maximum" gesture to show all pages for navigation. i don't really use tabs when i have many open any more, because they go off the edge of the screen pretty quickly anyway. safari is also incredibly fast compared to chrome and ff. i love ff, but since starting to use safari i honestly don't think i could switch back
Roritharr 10y ago
With UBlock Edge being available, Edge is quickly becoming my favorite browser. It feels faster than Chrome and the DevTools are nearly as good.
- bostand 10y ago
  As far as I know, there is no uBlock for Edge right now. not the real ublock any way
  - Roritharr 10y ago
    What is this then? https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh444l4 https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh444l4 https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge
    - bostand 10y ago
      This version is not developed by the original developer (Gorhil). Given what happened after the previous ublock splitt iam hesitant to use it.
      - vizzier 10y ago
        Not a user of the edge version myself but the above version is endorsed on the uBlock origin repo: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#microsoft-edge https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#microsoft-edge
- devwastaken 10y ago
  I've found edge to just be an auto-updated version of IE. Microsoft still thinks they're special, so they don't have to implement some functionality all other browsers do. I would highly prefer all of my users to be on Firefox or Chrome, or else I still end up writing special code for 'Internet Edge'.
  - ancarda 10y ago
nightpool 10y ago
Wait, what's this about re-enabling flash? From what I heard, Chrome 56 is going to disable flash by default.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  Chrome 56 is supposed to make Flash click-to-play on sites that the user doesn't frequent ("site engagement"). The engagement threshold will ramp up through 2017 until Flash is click-to-play by default on all sites.
  - 0x0 10y ago
    I used to disable flash in chrome://plugins/ but starting in Chrome 56 it keeps re-enabling it there (and all the other plugins) on every launch. I still have "click-to-play-flash" set, but the result is that instead of being served a html5 player, I'm being served a blocked "click-to-play" flash player.
    - beojan 10y ago
      I have a feeling this is a bug rather than a deliberate choice, given Google are trying to encourage use of HTML5.
      - mynameisvlad 10y ago
        That, plus the "(and all the other plugins)" really signals that this is unintended. Something probably isn't reading or writing the setting to the right place, and it's just being enabled by default.
    - cpeterso 10y ago
      I just updated from Chrome 55 to 56 and saw the same thing in chrome://plugins. I guess Google's position is that click-to-play Flash is the same as disabled Flash because the plugin doesn't run without user action.
mikenew 10y ago
Vivaldi is worth taking a look at. It's headed up by the former Opera CEO and is targeted at the more savvy, developer-type user. I think their tagline is "a browser for our friends". It's not perfect, but I've found myself having to open up Chrome as a backup less and less often. At this point I think it's been about a month since I've needed Chrome.
- echelon 10y ago
  I've started using Brave since it's open source and comes with an ad blocker built in. (It's a fork of Chromium.) If you're using mobile Chrome on Android, you should seriously take a look at Brave.
- sengork 10y ago
  I second this choice. So far Vivaldi has had very frequent updates and the navigational GUI aspect of the browser have the swiss army knife feel to it (not quite up to the par of Opera 12.x days but getting there quickly). Vivaldi's native tab management far surpasses both Chrome and Firefox. Likewise native mouse gestures work in every place including the speed dial (unlike plugins which attempt to do so on other browsers). The only thing I miss is tab synchronisation across mobile and desktop devices.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
    What's special about its tab management?
    - innocentoldguy 10y ago
      Here are a series of videos that explain the tab features in Vivaldi: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72e6dBabYNVRfpvEUt-WNfV7tZuKDAPB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72e6dBabYNVRfpvEUt-W...
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Vivaldi is not open source however right?
newman314 10y ago
I noticed that Chrome had moved the SSL details dialog away from the lock dropdown too. Does anyone know the rationale for doing so? It's made trying to figure out what the connection is using into a multi-step pain now.
- Jerry2 10y ago
  >I noticed that Chrome had moved the SSL details dialog away from the lock dropdown too. I have no idea about the rationale but here's where SSL details reside now... it's insane what they have done: >First, get into Developer tools. You can do this via Chrome’s upper-right three vertical dots, then click “More tools” — then “Developer tools” — or on many systems you can just press the F12 button. >But wait, there’s still more (yeah, Google took a simple click in an intuitive place and replaced it with a bunch of clicks scattered around). >Once the panel opens, look up at its top. If you don’t see the word “Security” already, click on the “>>” to the right of “Console” — then look down the list that appears and click on “Security” — which will open the Security panel with all of the certificate-related goodies. When you’re done there, click the big “X” in the upper right of the panel to return to normal browser operations. https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/01/28/heres-where-google-hid-the-ssl-certificate-information-you-may-need https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/01/28/heres-where-google-hid-...
  - fmorel 10y ago
    Or >Click on the Secure/Not Secure/(i) page info button. >Click "Details" to go straight to the Security panel of the Developer Tools
- madsushi 10y ago
  There's a Chromium bug that goes into more details, but the basic idea was that they didn't want the cert details button to be in the Page Info pop up, but didn't have a new place to put it. In Chrome 56, the SSL icon now shows "Secure" or "Not Secure", so more users will be clicking on Page Info, and they didn't like technical details in that pane. There's a new bug to find a better place for certificate details in Chrome 57. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971
slacka 10y ago
This bug is about Chrome 57, not Chromium. Have you actually been manually disabling widevine all along? Because I use Chromium on Arch and I have to manually enable widevine to play Netflix. If you don't like Google's vision of how Chromium should be configured by default, why not just use Chromium in the first place?
- 0x0 10y ago
  Yes I have been disabling widevine, nacl and flash in chrome:plugins since chrome was in its teens. At that time there used to be even more crap there, stuff like adobe and picasa and whatnot. I'm considering Chromium too, but if I'm going to migrate, I might as well migrate to something like Safari which has the added benefit of cross device integration (ios-macos). Sticking with chromium likely signals a vote for chrome in browser stats that I would rather not do. Firefox would have been the ideal pick had it not been for multiple very dubious choices in their history like bundling hello and pocket.
syshum 10y ago
Too bad Firefox is doing everything in its power to make itself a Chrome Clone... Including Widevine, Chrome Extensions, and various other things
SunShiranui 10y ago
Just switch to Firefox. This kind of stuff is why we need plurality in the browser space, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that takes - or has to take - a pro-user stance on many issues.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  I'm curious about your train of thought, how is Firefox and Mozilla are pro-user? And let's not take their PR into account, just facts of what they actually did so differently from Google to make them noticeably pro-user in your opinion.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    It's easy to disable the little bit of surveillance they do to make money. Whereas, Google keeps surveilling people in more ways over time in their various platforms. The difference probably comes from whether users or advertisers are primary focus. What made you think Firefox and Mozilla are so anti-user? I didn't get many claims along those lines back when I was evaluating them.
    - drdaeman 10y ago
      Maybe it's just me being silly, over-critical and nitpickng minor things, but... Various design decisions didn't feel right to me. Few examples that come to mind: - Sync is just terrible. It's insecure, awfully overengineered, poorly documented proprietary mess. - Mandatory addon signing was understandable, but still didn't felt exactly right. Probably because I'm a luddite don't fancy those walled garden app stores, and that somehow resembled those. - Moving to WebExtensions-only is going to hurt badly. AFAIK it was announced they'll soon stop signing new non-WE addons for Firefox 53 (which is quite real soon). I don't want a Chromium clone with another rendering engine and Firefox Account instead of Google. - DRM support. Browser market share, user requests, etc, but still - thanks for helping that cancer spread more freely. - Test Pilot instead of just publishing an experimental addons on AMO feels weird. Especially the fact that those addons self-uninstall after someone says the experiment's over. Well, it's Mozilla work and it's their decision how they want things to be, but it just doesn't feel right to me. FLOSS used to be somehow... different in days back there. - Pocket integration was sort of controversial. I've used Pocket's extension, but it surely didn't belong to the browser core. - Some UIs were dumbed down to the extent of being barely usable. Some comments blame Chrome hiding TLS info here, but Mozilla had pioneered that (although to a lesser extent).
pjmlp 10y ago
Companies care for their shareholders, they are not people with morals of good or bad. Finally people start to understand "Do no evil" for the marketing message it was.
- placebo 10y ago
  I'd argue that companies don't care about anything as they are not sentient. The culture and morals of a company is an aggregate of the morals of the people that operate and make up these companies, so this "companies care for shareholders" being a free ticket to doing immoral things does not get anyone off the hook (morally speaking). Of course life is complex, things aren't black and white, etc. etc. but I still believe business can be successful without being evil (whether it was originally intended as marketing message or not)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
userbinator 10y ago
What if Firefox or Safari also follow, as they did with a lot of previously unwanted changes? "I'll be seriously reconsidering IE before the next Firefox/Safari release"? Browser "choice" has always been more an illusion than anything else. One or another may be a little further ahead than the others but they all appear to be heading down the locked-down, unconfigurable, opaque, user-hostile "consume and don't oppose" path. If you want to get away from all that, then I suggest looking into the more obscure alternative browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, etc.
rhubarbquid 10y ago
I'm curious why you'd be opposed to throttling background tabs. I could see it being a problem if it interfered with, for example, playback from things like soundcloud, but I'd also consider that a bug. Other than that, it seems like it would be a win in battery life for people on laptops. Maybe there's some use case I'm not thinking of or not aware of though. Hasn't Safari been doing something like throttling background tabs for a while? I don't really know the details of how Safari and Chrome's new feature compares, but you may be equally unhappy with Safari in that respect. I'm with you on the other stuff though, I always disable Flash, NaCl and DRM plugins. I also hate the forced Material Design UI. Having a Mac native app look like Android is visually jarring. I tried switching to Safari, Firefox, and Brave a few months ago because I was unhappy with the direction Chrome was going, but ultimately ended up coming back to Chrome. The big things that brought me back: Safari isn't supported by Privacy Badger. With Brave, it was that if you open a new window and start typing immediately, it would lose the first few keystrokes... though I just downloaded the latest, and that seems to be fixed now. I don't remember off hand what stopped me from using Firefox
- BrendanEich 10y ago
  That was a bad Brave bug, but we fixed it. Please feel free to try us again and give feedback (I have open DM on twitter). Thanks, and sorry about that bug!
tornadoboy55 10y ago
Safari has done tab throttling for years. Things like that are why Chrome used to cut battery life in half compared to Safari. I don't understand people who complain about something that's essentially a feature, not a problem.
- sp332 10y ago
  Chrome's proposed throttling is very aggressive (something like 10 milliseconds of processing allowed per second). I'm sure with some tuning it could be less controversial.
tehabe 10y ago
For Flash there is actually a solution. On chrome://flags you can look for chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash and set it to Enabled. Afterwards it is like that Flash is disabled. No idea for Widevine except of course using Chromium instead of Chrome.
SquareWheel 10y ago
>moving SSL certificate details dialog hidden away into devtools Hidden away? They added an entire panel dedicated to security information. It's far more pronounced than it was previously. This is in addition to the large green "Secure" text to the left of the URL bar.
- lnx01 10y ago
  Yes, but you can't get to cert details by clicking the green "Secure" anymore, you must open dev tools to see the cert details.
  - fmorel 10y ago
    No. If you click on Secure, the popup has a link to the Security panel.
    - ericlaw 10y ago
      Not anymore, after https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465. Hence https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971
metafunctor 10y ago
I've switched to Safari a few months ago already. Looks like I won't be switching back any time soon. Thinks I like: improved battery life, fast, was able to disable video autoplay in Debug menu, no Flash at all, great integration with iOS, dev tools are actually good (I heard they would be bad, but nope, they're good). Thinks I don't like: no favicons on tabs, Safari does not have profiles (I used a separate one for Facebook), Chrome has more extensions (but happy with Ghostery and Adguard so far).
homulilly 10y ago
I keep trying to go back to Firefox but it's so slow and janky compared to chrome (even with electrolysis enabled) I switch back within a day. Will probably see if there are any good chromium builds out there though.
yAnonymous 10y ago
Agreed. Someone in the Chrome team is making a whole lot of bad decisions.

by 0x0 10y ago

malikNF 10y ago

I have actually started using firefox again recently, chrome has lost me due to how hard they (and Google as a company) are trying to push things on to people. Anyways, I am in love with the nightly build of ff and everyone should honestly give it atleast a week of their time to try it. The developer edition and the nightly build have some really interesting features for development out of the box and honestly helps make work easier. You do run in to the occasional error or two but for pre-release versions they are seriously stable. p.s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163 (Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014))

chimeracoder 10y ago
One thing to note - Nightly is compiled with certain debugging flags enabled, whereas Developer Edition is not. There is a slight performance hit, which is not always noticeable, but I mention it in case anybody tries Nightly and finds it slow.
- johnp_ 10y ago
  It should be noted that some of those features can be disabled via environment variables: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Benchmarking https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Benchmarking Specifically, I use those environment variables: JS_OPTION_USE_UNBOXED_ARRAYS=1 JSGC_DISABLE_POISONING=1 There's at least one other thing (async stack) that I'm aware of that may be tunable: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280819 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280819 edit: just figured out that that's "javascript.options.asyncstack", so I set it to disabled on nightly too. Fwiw, the unboxed objects bug is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1153266 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1153266 edit: typedobj performance improvements visible at the bottom of https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=misc https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=mi... edit: removed MOZ_QUIET=1, as a source inspection reveals that it is only compiled #ifdef DEBUG.
hunterwerlla 10y ago
I'm in the same boat. I got sick of chrome's annoying scaling problems and switched back to firefox after many years. I like that firefox actually gives you a choice about everything, unlike chrome (flash will never touch my system ever again). Additionally, nightly is smoother than chrome for me. Once the nightly improvements hit stable, I'm going to start recommending Firefox to my non tech savy family members again.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  If you're going to start recommending software and hardware to your friends and family then please support them when they run into problems and help them revert to their original choice when they decide to switch back.
neurostimulant 10y ago
I also decided to use Firefox again recently. There are some slight annoyances, but this time instead of complaining about it I decided to get the source code and tinker with it. Building Firefox from source is surprisingly very easy. I think Mozilla did a great job making the source code and the build process accessible for developers not familiar with Firefox internals like me.
zbraniecki 10y ago
Hi all. Just wanted to tell you that a lot of people working on Firefox are here and we really appreciate your word of mouth support and feedback. This year is going to be huge for us as we're wrapping up the part about reducing technical debt and start gearing toward using our new superpowers to innovate. We need your help to stay relevant (market share), improve quality (report bugs, write test cases), and improve (lots of code in Firefox is easy to hack on as we move a lot of UI to HTML/JS - like devtools).
- Chirael 10y ago
  This is great to read/hear. I'll put my vote in for two things. 1) Performance, performance, performance; this is what originally caused me to use Chrome a lot more, the perception of quick-to-open tabs and snappy responsiveness. 2) Privacy; this is something Google almost by definition can't compete on, because their business model depends on providing something free in exchange for user data (the opposite of privacy). A third important consideration of course is "not crashing" or at least if there is a crash, containing it to the offending tab - this is why I'm very happy to read about the progress of multi-process Firefox! Keep up the great work guys.
  - smw 10y ago
    My only serious problem with firefox is that a single tab can lock up the entire application. Otherwise, the performance _and_ memory usage is fantastic. But that one issue is enough to keep me away from it most of the time.
    - cpeterso 10y ago
      Multiple tab processes (aka "e10s-multi") should be shipping in Firefox 54 (now in the Firefox Nightly channel). The initial rollout of multi-process Firefox ("e10s") had one process for the browser UI and one process for all tabs (and a separate process for sandboxing Flash), so one bad tab could lock up all your tabs but your browser UI would still be responsive so you could close the bad tab. e10s-multi will increase the number of shared tab processes to two or more, balancing tab isolation vs memory overhead. In the meantime, you can test more tab processes by increasing the "dom.ipc.processCount" pref in about:config. I set my process count limit to 999. :)
Esau 10y ago
Chrome is run by a company that collects and sells the personal information of its users for advertising. Everyone needs to be weary of it. That said, Mozilla has also made some bone-headed decisions. Integrating Pocket, forcing a chat client, and advertising tiles really turned me off.
- angryasian 10y ago
  please explain how they sell personal information, as far as I know.. they allow companies to target attributes in aggregate and you may see an ad based on your behaviors. No company actually receives your personal information
  - ams6110 10y ago
    > No company actually receives your personal information Google receives it.
    - angryasian 10y ago
      so they aren't selling it
      - malikNF 10y ago
        Yes they are, they are offering the information they have about their users to their advertisers. If its bad or good is a debate for another time. But the fact is you are the product, your information is the product they are selling.
        mda 10y ago
        What kind of information do they offer to advertisers?
        niutech 10y ago
        Citation from Google: "We try to show you useful ads by using data collected from your devices, including your searches and location, websites and apps you have used, videos and ads you have seen, and personal information you have given us, such as your age range, gender, and topics of interest."
rb666 10y ago
You made me reinstall FF Nightly after some years of using Chrome. Must say, the speed is so much better than it used to be. I think I will try switch to FF entirely.
9248 10y ago
I really wish I could use Firefox! But I gave up after trying repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to force-enable hardware acceleration and bypass their 'video card blacklist'. From what I understand they check driver versions in a couple places on Windows, and disable hw acc. if the version is lower than X, or the versions they get, say from registry and dll's, are different, mismatch. Thing is, the matter is quite complicated on dual-gpu laptops (intel+dedicated) since manufacturers give us all kinds of custom drivers. Firefox will try to find a driver version, it won't find anything from Intel or AMD/NVidia, and it will default to software rendering. As a user I don't have the luxury to simply 'Update my graphics drivers', I have to live with whatever custom software I got from the manufacturer.
- zbraniecki 10y ago
  please, report the bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org and describe your problem. Thank you!

RodericDay 10y ago

This kinda post reminds of these posts decrying how bad things are with x and a threat to do y, eg: move to Canada. And the punchline is always a soggy: "I'm seriously reconsidering". Post would be much more effective if you just switched already, and discussed your experience having done so.

zzzcpan 10y ago
It's hard to reconsider firefox or safari because they are also very much anti-user. Maybe a fork of firefox/chromium without all that anti-user stuff would be better, with plugins only click-to-play, with no autoplay for animations, with a quick way to toggle javascript in a tab, etc. But there is no such fork.
- hashhar 10y ago
  Could you elaborate on some anti-user stuff that Firefox and Safari do? I'd like to know. I do consider Firefox comparatively more open than Chrome though, so I may have my biases.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    Not OP, but I tried both FF and Safari recently hoping they would reduce the footprint. FF ended up being way too slow. I stopped using Safari after a few minutes because they decided to not show favicons on tabs anymore and you can't enable it at all. How is anybody supposed to find the right one of the 15-20 tabs that are open. Insanity!
    - rickycook 10y ago
      i agree; no tab favicons is upsetting. they do come back if you pin tabs (so only the icon is visible), and i'd say apple wants you to do the "zoom out beyond maximum" gesture to show all pages for navigation. i don't really use tabs when i have many open any more, because they go off the edge of the screen pretty quickly anyway. safari is also incredibly fast compared to chrome and ff. i love ff, but since starting to use safari i honestly don't think i could switch back

Roritharr 10y ago

With UBlock Edge being available, Edge is quickly becoming my favorite browser. It feels faster than Chrome and the DevTools are nearly as good.

bostand 10y ago
As far as I know, there is no uBlock for Edge right now. not the real ublock any way
- Roritharr 10y ago
  What is this then? https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh444l4 https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh444l4 https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge
  - bostand 10y ago
    This version is not developed by the original developer (Gorhil). Given what happened after the previous ublock splitt iam hesitant to use it.
    - vizzier 10y ago
      Not a user of the edge version myself but the above version is endorsed on the uBlock origin repo: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#microsoft-edge https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#microsoft-edge
devwastaken 10y ago
I've found edge to just be an auto-updated version of IE. Microsoft still thinks they're special, so they don't have to implement some functionality all other browsers do. I would highly prefer all of my users to be on Firefox or Chrome, or else I still end up writing special code for 'Internet Edge'.
- ancarda 10y ago

nightpool 10y ago

Wait, what's this about re-enabling flash? From what I heard, Chrome 56 is going to disable flash by default.

cpeterso 10y ago
Chrome 56 is supposed to make Flash click-to-play on sites that the user doesn't frequent ("site engagement"). The engagement threshold will ramp up through 2017 until Flash is click-to-play by default on all sites.
- 0x0 10y ago
  I used to disable flash in chrome://plugins/ but starting in Chrome 56 it keeps re-enabling it there (and all the other plugins) on every launch. I still have "click-to-play-flash" set, but the result is that instead of being served a html5 player, I'm being served a blocked "click-to-play" flash player.
  - beojan 10y ago
    I have a feeling this is a bug rather than a deliberate choice, given Google are trying to encourage use of HTML5.
    - mynameisvlad 10y ago
      That, plus the "(and all the other plugins)" really signals that this is unintended. Something probably isn't reading or writing the setting to the right place, and it's just being enabled by default.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    I just updated from Chrome 55 to 56 and saw the same thing in chrome://plugins. I guess Google's position is that click-to-play Flash is the same as disabled Flash because the plugin doesn't run without user action.

mikenew 10y ago

Vivaldi is worth taking a look at. It's headed up by the former Opera CEO and is targeted at the more savvy, developer-type user. I think their tagline is "a browser for our friends". It's not perfect, but I've found myself having to open up Chrome as a backup less and less often. At this point I think it's been about a month since I've needed Chrome.

echelon 10y ago
I've started using Brave since it's open source and comes with an ad blocker built in. (It's a fork of Chromium.) If you're using mobile Chrome on Android, you should seriously take a look at Brave.
sengork 10y ago
I second this choice. So far Vivaldi has had very frequent updates and the navigational GUI aspect of the browser have the swiss army knife feel to it (not quite up to the par of Opera 12.x days but getting there quickly). Vivaldi's native tab management far surpasses both Chrome and Firefox. Likewise native mouse gestures work in every place including the speed dial (unlike plugins which attempt to do so on other browsers). The only thing I miss is tab synchronisation across mobile and desktop devices.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
  What's special about its tab management?
  - innocentoldguy 10y ago
    Here are a series of videos that explain the tab features in Vivaldi: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72e6dBabYNVRfpvEUt-WNfV7tZuKDAPB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72e6dBabYNVRfpvEUt-W...
ekianjo 10y ago
Vivaldi is not open source however right?

newman314 10y ago

I noticed that Chrome had moved the SSL details dialog away from the lock dropdown too. Does anyone know the rationale for doing so? It's made trying to figure out what the connection is using into a multi-step pain now.

Jerry2 10y ago
>I noticed that Chrome had moved the SSL details dialog away from the lock dropdown too. I have no idea about the rationale but here's where SSL details reside now... it's insane what they have done: >First, get into Developer tools. You can do this via Chrome’s upper-right three vertical dots, then click “More tools” — then “Developer tools” — or on many systems you can just press the F12 button. >But wait, there’s still more (yeah, Google took a simple click in an intuitive place and replaced it with a bunch of clicks scattered around). >Once the panel opens, look up at its top. If you don’t see the word “Security” already, click on the “>>” to the right of “Console” — then look down the list that appears and click on “Security” — which will open the Security panel with all of the certificate-related goodies. When you’re done there, click the big “X” in the upper right of the panel to return to normal browser operations. https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/01/28/heres-where-google-hid-the-ssl-certificate-information-you-may-need https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/01/28/heres-where-google-hid-...
- fmorel 10y ago
  Or >Click on the Secure/Not Secure/(i) page info button. >Click "Details" to go straight to the Security panel of the Developer Tools
madsushi 10y ago
There's a Chromium bug that goes into more details, but the basic idea was that they didn't want the cert details button to be in the Page Info pop up, but didn't have a new place to put it. In Chrome 56, the SSL icon now shows "Secure" or "Not Secure", so more users will be clicking on Page Info, and they didn't like technical details in that pane. There's a new bug to find a better place for certificate details in Chrome 57. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971

slacka 10y ago

This bug is about Chrome 57, not Chromium. Have you actually been manually disabling widevine all along? Because I use Chromium on Arch and I have to manually enable widevine to play Netflix. If you don't like Google's vision of how Chromium should be configured by default, why not just use Chromium in the first place?

0x0 10y ago
Yes I have been disabling widevine, nacl and flash in chrome:plugins since chrome was in its teens. At that time there used to be even more crap there, stuff like adobe and picasa and whatnot. I'm considering Chromium too, but if I'm going to migrate, I might as well migrate to something like Safari which has the added benefit of cross device integration (ios-macos). Sticking with chromium likely signals a vote for chrome in browser stats that I would rather not do. Firefox would have been the ideal pick had it not been for multiple very dubious choices in their history like bundling hello and pocket.

syshum 10y ago

Too bad Firefox is doing everything in its power to make itself a Chrome Clone... Including Widevine, Chrome Extensions, and various other things

SunShiranui 10y ago

Just switch to Firefox. This kind of stuff is why we need plurality in the browser space, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that takes - or has to take - a pro-user stance on many issues.

zzzcpan 10y ago
I'm curious about your train of thought, how is Firefox and Mozilla are pro-user? And let's not take their PR into account, just facts of what they actually did so differently from Google to make them noticeably pro-user in your opinion.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  It's easy to disable the little bit of surveillance they do to make money. Whereas, Google keeps surveilling people in more ways over time in their various platforms. The difference probably comes from whether users or advertisers are primary focus. What made you think Firefox and Mozilla are so anti-user? I didn't get many claims along those lines back when I was evaluating them.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    Maybe it's just me being silly, over-critical and nitpickng minor things, but... Various design decisions didn't feel right to me. Few examples that come to mind: - Sync is just terrible. It's insecure, awfully overengineered, poorly documented proprietary mess. - Mandatory addon signing was understandable, but still didn't felt exactly right. Probably because I'm a luddite don't fancy those walled garden app stores, and that somehow resembled those. - Moving to WebExtensions-only is going to hurt badly. AFAIK it was announced they'll soon stop signing new non-WE addons for Firefox 53 (which is quite real soon). I don't want a Chromium clone with another rendering engine and Firefox Account instead of Google. - DRM support. Browser market share, user requests, etc, but still - thanks for helping that cancer spread more freely. - Test Pilot instead of just publishing an experimental addons on AMO feels weird. Especially the fact that those addons self-uninstall after someone says the experiment's over. Well, it's Mozilla work and it's their decision how they want things to be, but it just doesn't feel right to me. FLOSS used to be somehow... different in days back there. - Pocket integration was sort of controversial. I've used Pocket's extension, but it surely didn't belong to the browser core. - Some UIs were dumbed down to the extent of being barely usable. Some comments blame Chrome hiding TLS info here, but Mozilla had pioneered that (although to a lesser extent).

pjmlp 10y ago

Companies care for their shareholders, they are not people with morals of good or bad. Finally people start to understand "Do no evil" for the marketing message it was.

placebo 10y ago
I'd argue that companies don't care about anything as they are not sentient. The culture and morals of a company is an aggregate of the morals of the people that operate and make up these companies, so this "companies care for shareholders" being a free ticket to doing immoral things does not get anyone off the hook (morally speaking). Of course life is complex, things aren't black and white, etc. etc. but I still believe business can be successful without being evil (whether it was originally intended as marketing message or not)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

userbinator 10y ago

What if Firefox or Safari also follow, as they did with a lot of previously unwanted changes? "I'll be seriously reconsidering IE before the next Firefox/Safari release"? Browser "choice" has always been more an illusion than anything else. One or another may be a little further ahead than the others but they all appear to be heading down the locked-down, unconfigurable, opaque, user-hostile "consume and don't oppose" path. If you want to get away from all that, then I suggest looking into the more obscure alternative browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, etc.

rhubarbquid 10y ago

I'm curious why you'd be opposed to throttling background tabs. I could see it being a problem if it interfered with, for example, playback from things like soundcloud, but I'd also consider that a bug. Other than that, it seems like it would be a win in battery life for people on laptops. Maybe there's some use case I'm not thinking of or not aware of though. Hasn't Safari been doing something like throttling background tabs for a while? I don't really know the details of how Safari and Chrome's new feature compares, but you may be equally unhappy with Safari in that respect. I'm with you on the other stuff though, I always disable Flash, NaCl and DRM plugins. I also hate the forced Material Design UI. Having a Mac native app look like Android is visually jarring. I tried switching to Safari, Firefox, and Brave a few months ago because I was unhappy with the direction Chrome was going, but ultimately ended up coming back to Chrome. The big things that brought me back: Safari isn't supported by Privacy Badger. With Brave, it was that if you open a new window and start typing immediately, it would lose the first few keystrokes... though I just downloaded the latest, and that seems to be fixed now. I don't remember off hand what stopped me from using Firefox

BrendanEich 10y ago
That was a bad Brave bug, but we fixed it. Please feel free to try us again and give feedback (I have open DM on twitter). Thanks, and sorry about that bug!

tornadoboy55 10y ago

Safari has done tab throttling for years. Things like that are why Chrome used to cut battery life in half compared to Safari. I don't understand people who complain about something that's essentially a feature, not a problem.

sp332 10y ago
Chrome's proposed throttling is very aggressive (something like 10 milliseconds of processing allowed per second). I'm sure with some tuning it could be less controversial.

tehabe 10y ago

For Flash there is actually a solution. On chrome://flags you can look for chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash and set it to Enabled. Afterwards it is like that Flash is disabled. No idea for Widevine except of course using Chromium instead of Chrome.

SquareWheel 10y ago

>moving SSL certificate details dialog hidden away into devtools Hidden away? They added an entire panel dedicated to security information. It's far more pronounced than it was previously. This is in addition to the large green "Secure" text to the left of the URL bar.

lnx01 10y ago
Yes, but you can't get to cert details by clicking the green "Secure" anymore, you must open dev tools to see the cert details.
- fmorel 10y ago
  No. If you click on Secure, the popup has a link to the Security panel.
  - ericlaw 10y ago
    Not anymore, after https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465. Hence https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971

metafunctor 10y ago

I've switched to Safari a few months ago already. Looks like I won't be switching back any time soon. Thinks I like: improved battery life, fast, was able to disable video autoplay in Debug menu, no Flash at all, great integration with iOS, dev tools are actually good (I heard they would be bad, but nope, they're good). Thinks I don't like: no favicons on tabs, Safari does not have profiles (I used a separate one for Facebook), Chrome has more extensions (but happy with Ghostery and Adguard so far).

homulilly 10y ago

I keep trying to go back to Firefox but it's so slow and janky compared to chrome (even with electrolysis enabled) I switch back within a day. Will probably see if there are any good chromium builds out there though.

yAnonymous 10y ago

Agreed. Someone in the Chrome team is making a whole lot of bad decisions.