13 ms·

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open in Chrome, but otherwise only use it when something just won't work in my locked-down Firefox. I also can't recommend highly enough Firefox on Android, particularly with uBlock Origin and the "Dark Background and Light Text" addon (currently at version 0.6.8 for ease of finding). For HN you'll want to use the "Simple CSS" dark setting instead of the default - that keeps the arrows, but you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments. Edit: I also think it's interesting how much Chrome now minimizes and almost hides the Chrome App Store to add new extensions. It's almost as if it's not making Google any money and people keep installing adblockers through it.

modzu 8y ago
+1 for ff on android (because it can run extensions) recommend checking out 'night light mode' for night browsing -- it does some things a little nicer like dims images and uses low contrast (full disclosure: i am the author. feedback welcome!) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/night-light-mode/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/night-light-m...
- aembleton 8y ago
  When I go to https://rideways.com/ https://rideways.com/ it inverts the large background image
  - modzu 8y ago
    thanks for the report! a fix is forthcoming (looks like some kind of css preloading is tripping up the plugin)
mxvzr 8y ago
I'd remove Ghostery. Not only is it useless once you are running uMatrix & uBlock Origin, they also used to sells your data (page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics) if you activated a feature called "GhostRank". Not sure whether it's still true or not.
- miqkt 8y ago
  Ghostery also had an incident [1] last month where they exposed e-mail addresses of some users, which I guess adds further doubt to their reliability. [1]: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-incident-update/ https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-i...
  - black_puppydog 8y ago
    wait, why do they need users' emails?
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      They don't, that's the thing; they wanted to monetize their service, and selling e-mail addresses and user data is one way to do that.
    - tinus_hn 8y ago
      If you want, you can create an account to ‘sync your ghostery settings’. The username of the account is your email address. The exposure happened because they sent a mail with a lot of people in the CC: field. Amateurish but it happens. The irony is that the mail was to inform you of the privacy changes due to GDPR.
- rubenbe 8y ago
  Indeed, and I personally replaced it with the EFF privacy badger plugin.
- fencepost 8y ago
  Ghostery is convenient in that it categorizes what it's blocking - most of the time it's obvious, particularly with uBlock Origin in Advanced mode, but sometimes I'll look at things in uMatrix and say "OK, X is blocked, but why was it on the page and will unblocking it resolve things?" For example, looking at jumpcloud.com Ghostery breaks the 7 blocked items into 2 advertising trackers, 2 "Essential" trackers, 2 analytics trackers and 1 social media tracker. As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.
mikedilger 8y ago
Is there a reason to use both uBlock Origin and uMatrix? I thought uMatrix was a more explicit version of the same functionality as uBlock Origin (and written by the same guy).
- mikedilger 8y ago
  I dug into this myself just now. At it's core, uMatrix is "default deny" so it doesn't need all the blacklists. But there are things that uBlock Origin provides that uMatrix does not perhaps including cosmetic filtering, popup blocker, zapper/picker element, etc. The author Raymond Hill (gorhill) has switched back to uMatrix himself and dedicates more development efforts to it now. https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/support-umatrix/5131/179 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/support-umatrix/5131/179
- drewmol 8y ago
  I use them together, uMatrix as a fine grained control tool where I can setup a saved profile and click-allow until functionality & appearance are acceptable to me, and for 'one-off' or 'fuck-it no time' situations I just toggle uMatrix off. It is very rare I have to turn off uBlock Origin as well (the nuclear option). This leaves me four-five quick clicks away from the median or average user experience.
  - chopin 8y ago
    uBlock Origin offers part of the uMatrix functionality as well in the "advanced user" mode.
- simcop2387 8y ago
  They can do similar things, uBlock Origin is setup to block ads and other elements on the page (depending on the lists you subscribe to). But uMatrix is more like Noscript, it's blocking the loading of resources from the web. So you can block javascript from some domains, while allowing images or video, etc. I use both so i can block a lot of third party scripts even without them being ads (so most tracking scripts and such).
- beagle3 8y ago
zamalek 8y ago
> Firefox is my "daily driver" I only have FF Developer Edition (IE and Edge, blegh) installed on my host. The only time I open Chrome or otherwise is inside a VM. If a website doesn't work I just close the tab. That is assuming that ever happens; off the top of my head this hasn't happened since the Quantum beta launched.
- bambataa 8y ago
  Even with Quantum I still find Firefox is almost unusably slow on some pages. It also causes very spikey resource usage. I’d like to use it exclusively but sometimes when I want to cool down my laptop I just switch to Chrome. This is on a Retina MacBook.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    This is macOS-specific, I had noticed it there too, but not on Linux.
  - callahad 8y ago
    Have you tried setting the screen scaling back to the default, or using Firefox Nightly? I believe we recently resolved a bug around that, though I could be mis-remembering.
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  That will happen a lot with Google's own pages ;).
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I second this. I've been using FF with uBlock origin on the desktop and on Android for years now. I'm using fairly demanding and rapidly changing web apps for my customer's cloud stuff, and FF runs it flawlessly where it would have memory-leaks etc just three years ago. The only complaint I've had was with dog-slow SVG animations a couple years ago (for a simplistic game programming project with the kids), but I believe that has since long improved as well. I hope we can keep the level of relatively mature support for Web standards accross browsers as it is, rather than make the Web more complex all the time.
lloda 8y ago
> you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments sounds like a win, honestly.
oselhn 8y ago
Ghostery like filtering is already implemented in firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection).
chme 8y ago
I really love addons like 'Dark Background and Light Text', but they don't work with the 'New Tab', 'about:*' and addons.mozilla.org pages like most other addons in recent Firefox. For the 'New Tab' page I now use 'New Tab Tools' to set the background to black. But I am still unhappy that its not possible to set all other pages to a dark theme. Also that Vimium doesn't work with those pages is a shame as well. I hope Mozilla fixes that regression soon. Web Extensions should have the same abilities as the XUL extensions.
- myfonj 8y ago
  You can still tweak Firefox internals but you have to resort to its native `userChrome.css` [0] since current extensions API does not allow access to every corner. Luckily you can use devtools for that [1] what makes it quite pleasant (at least you don't have to restart browser to see the change). You can use pre-made package ([2][3]) and toggle what you want. [0] https://www.userchrome.org/ https://www.userchrome.org/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial_how_to_create_and_livedebug_userchromecss/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial... [2] https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/ https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/ [3] https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks
- unexistance 8y ago
  there's an extreme method of doing 'light text on dark background', like my guide below http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize.html http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize.... in which all background & foreground color are of your choice. been using it for 5 years at least
  - chme 8y ago
    Thanks, but I do like it to be easily switchable. Some pages expect certain background colors and changing them makes embedded svgs hard or impossible to see. Maybe you can get away with using the solarized theme, but I prefer having a black background... Thanks for this suggestions anyway
tabs_masterrace 8y ago
Also very simple but highly useful Extension: Cookie AutoDelete Deletes cookies & local storage after you leave a website. You can whitelist a few domains like Github etc. for convenience. The only downside is you'll get "privacy reminder / cookie accept" popups every time anew.
atrotors 8y ago
I recommend removing Ghostery. They sell aggregated data or something. EFF makes an extension called privacy badger. It learns which websites are tracking you automatically. and blocks them or their cookies.
irrenhaus 8y ago
Actually I would really like to use FF again. But each and every time I try it I'm impressed with the desktop version, install the Android version and instantly am driven away from FF. Not only that FF on Android is awfully slow for me. But they also refuse to support either Android accessability services or the new auto completion services which makes them basically totally useless if you want to use a password manager on Android. This one thing (and the performance, but that I could ignore) is what totally prevents me from using FF.
- qazwse_ 8y ago
  Depending on what password manager you use, you can try getting the Firefox extension for it. I use Bitwarden, and their extension just works. Although I agree with you that they should have support for it through the accessibility/auto-completion services. The ability to have uBlock in a mobile browser is too convenient to give up.
hateful 8y ago
Thanks for pointing me towards "Dark Background and Light Text". Having a dark background and light text is something that's very important to me.

modzu 8y ago

+1 for ff on android (because it can run extensions) recommend checking out 'night light mode' for night browsing -- it does some things a little nicer like dims images and uses low contrast (full disclosure: i am the author. feedback welcome!) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/night-light-mode/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/night-light-m...

aembleton 8y ago
When I go to https://rideways.com/ https://rideways.com/ it inverts the large background image
- modzu 8y ago
  thanks for the report! a fix is forthcoming (looks like some kind of css preloading is tripping up the plugin)

mxvzr 8y ago

I'd remove Ghostery. Not only is it useless once you are running uMatrix & uBlock Origin, they also used to sells your data (page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics) if you activated a feature called "GhostRank". Not sure whether it's still true or not.

miqkt 8y ago
Ghostery also had an incident [1] last month where they exposed e-mail addresses of some users, which I guess adds further doubt to their reliability. [1]: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-incident-update/ https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-i...
- black_puppydog 8y ago
  wait, why do they need users' emails?
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    They don't, that's the thing; they wanted to monetize their service, and selling e-mail addresses and user data is one way to do that.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    If you want, you can create an account to ‘sync your ghostery settings’. The username of the account is your email address. The exposure happened because they sent a mail with a lot of people in the CC: field. Amateurish but it happens. The irony is that the mail was to inform you of the privacy changes due to GDPR.
rubenbe 8y ago
Indeed, and I personally replaced it with the EFF privacy badger plugin.
fencepost 8y ago
Ghostery is convenient in that it categorizes what it's blocking - most of the time it's obvious, particularly with uBlock Origin in Advanced mode, but sometimes I'll look at things in uMatrix and say "OK, X is blocked, but why was it on the page and will unblocking it resolve things?" For example, looking at jumpcloud.com Ghostery breaks the 7 blocked items into 2 advertising trackers, 2 "Essential" trackers, 2 analytics trackers and 1 social media tracker. As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.

mikedilger 8y ago

Is there a reason to use both uBlock Origin and uMatrix? I thought uMatrix was a more explicit version of the same functionality as uBlock Origin (and written by the same guy).

mikedilger 8y ago
I dug into this myself just now. At it's core, uMatrix is "default deny" so it doesn't need all the blacklists. But there are things that uBlock Origin provides that uMatrix does not perhaps including cosmetic filtering, popup blocker, zapper/picker element, etc. The author Raymond Hill (gorhill) has switched back to uMatrix himself and dedicates more development efforts to it now. https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/support-umatrix/5131/179 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/support-umatrix/5131/179
drewmol 8y ago
I use them together, uMatrix as a fine grained control tool where I can setup a saved profile and click-allow until functionality & appearance are acceptable to me, and for 'one-off' or 'fuck-it no time' situations I just toggle uMatrix off. It is very rare I have to turn off uBlock Origin as well (the nuclear option). This leaves me four-five quick clicks away from the median or average user experience.
- chopin 8y ago
  uBlock Origin offers part of the uMatrix functionality as well in the "advanced user" mode.
simcop2387 8y ago
They can do similar things, uBlock Origin is setup to block ads and other elements on the page (depending on the lists you subscribe to). But uMatrix is more like Noscript, it's blocking the loading of resources from the web. So you can block javascript from some domains, while allowing images or video, etc. I use both so i can block a lot of third party scripts even without them being ads (so most tracking scripts and such).
beagle3 8y ago

zamalek 8y ago

> Firefox is my "daily driver" I only have FF Developer Edition (IE and Edge, blegh) installed on my host. The only time I open Chrome or otherwise is inside a VM. If a website doesn't work I just close the tab. That is assuming that ever happens; off the top of my head this hasn't happened since the Quantum beta launched.

bambataa 8y ago
Even with Quantum I still find Firefox is almost unusably slow on some pages. It also causes very spikey resource usage. I’d like to use it exclusively but sometimes when I want to cool down my laptop I just switch to Chrome. This is on a Retina MacBook.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  This is macOS-specific, I had noticed it there too, but not on Linux.
- callahad 8y ago
  Have you tried setting the screen scaling back to the default, or using Firefox Nightly? I believe we recently resolved a bug around that, though I could be mis-remembering.
piyush_soni 8y ago
That will happen a lot with Google's own pages ;).

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I second this. I've been using FF with uBlock origin on the desktop and on Android for years now. I'm using fairly demanding and rapidly changing web apps for my customer's cloud stuff, and FF runs it flawlessly where it would have memory-leaks etc just three years ago. The only complaint I've had was with dog-slow SVG animations a couple years ago (for a simplistic game programming project with the kids), but I believe that has since long improved as well. I hope we can keep the level of relatively mature support for Web standards accross browsers as it is, rather than make the Web more complex all the time.

lloda 8y ago

> you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments sounds like a win, honestly.

oselhn 8y ago

Ghostery like filtering is already implemented in firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection).

chme 8y ago

I really love addons like 'Dark Background and Light Text', but they don't work with the 'New Tab', 'about:*' and addons.mozilla.org pages like most other addons in recent Firefox. For the 'New Tab' page I now use 'New Tab Tools' to set the background to black. But I am still unhappy that its not possible to set all other pages to a dark theme. Also that Vimium doesn't work with those pages is a shame as well. I hope Mozilla fixes that regression soon. Web Extensions should have the same abilities as the XUL extensions.

myfonj 8y ago
You can still tweak Firefox internals but you have to resort to its native `userChrome.css` [0] since current extensions API does not allow access to every corner. Luckily you can use devtools for that [1] what makes it quite pleasant (at least you don't have to restart browser to see the change). You can use pre-made package ([2][3]) and toggle what you want. [0] https://www.userchrome.org/ https://www.userchrome.org/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial_how_to_create_and_livedebug_userchromecss/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial... [2] https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/ https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/ [3] https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks
unexistance 8y ago
there's an extreme method of doing 'light text on dark background', like my guide below http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize.html http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize.... in which all background & foreground color are of your choice. been using it for 5 years at least
- chme 8y ago
  Thanks, but I do like it to be easily switchable. Some pages expect certain background colors and changing them makes embedded svgs hard or impossible to see. Maybe you can get away with using the solarized theme, but I prefer having a black background... Thanks for this suggestions anyway

tabs_masterrace 8y ago

Also very simple but highly useful Extension: Cookie AutoDelete Deletes cookies & local storage after you leave a website. You can whitelist a few domains like Github etc. for convenience. The only downside is you'll get "privacy reminder / cookie accept" popups every time anew.

atrotors 8y ago

I recommend removing Ghostery. They sell aggregated data or something. EFF makes an extension called privacy badger. It learns which websites are tracking you automatically. and blocks them or their cookies.

irrenhaus 8y ago

Actually I would really like to use FF again. But each and every time I try it I'm impressed with the desktop version, install the Android version and instantly am driven away from FF. Not only that FF on Android is awfully slow for me. But they also refuse to support either Android accessability services or the new auto completion services which makes them basically totally useless if you want to use a password manager on Android. This one thing (and the performance, but that I could ignore) is what totally prevents me from using FF.

qazwse_ 8y ago
Depending on what password manager you use, you can try getting the Firefox extension for it. I use Bitwarden, and their extension just works. Although I agree with you that they should have support for it through the accessibility/auto-completion services. The ability to have uBlock in a mobile browser is too convenient to give up.

hateful 8y ago

Thanks for pointing me towards "Dark Background and Light Text". Having a dark background and light text is something that's very important to me.