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Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

140 points by freediver 4y ago

mezobeli 4y ago
Librewolf?
account-5 4y ago
I'm not sure what this is offering over normal Firefox other than not having to turn off telemetry, install ublock ( and the other mentioned add-ons), and making use of user.js myself? Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".
- dartharva 4y ago
  "Hyper minimalistic UI"
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I'm glad to see someone still has the courage to work on browsers - which is increasingly declared "infeasible". Well done. > We have been moving further away from privacy and towards But sorry, I literally stopped reading at that point. The only feature that people want and need from browsers, and the only reason to even glance twice at yet another Firefox fork is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing. There is enormous scope here to add value - adding client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration. How about starting with a browser that can remember your privacy settings, instead of silently "updating" and defaulting back to the worst possible settings as Firefox does? Having the latest (probably broken and more privacy invasive) presentation features would be very low on my list.
    - kristiandupont 4y ago
      >The only feature that people want [...] Well, not me.
    - chrismonsanto 4y ago
      > The only feature that people want and need from browsers ... is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing. ... client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration That's what you're interested in at least, I don't care about these features and if it was up to me the #1 priority for Firefox developers would be making desktop mode persistent by-site on Android
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        Anyway, once again, well done. It seems to me that mainstream "web browsers" have become new "operating systems", but without the visbility, structure and purpose of actual operating systems.
        agileAlligator 4y ago
        I'll say this to anyone who will listen, we need to stop treating browsers as OS'. Whatever happened to good old desktop applications?
    - latexr 4y ago
      > I'm glad to see someone still has the courage to work on browsers - which is increasingly declared "infeasible". It’s new browser engines which are increasingly declared unfeasible. Browsers themselves are a dime a dozen.
    - agileAlligator 4y ago
      > adding client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration. How many people really care or even know about these things? 1 percent of the populace? Privacy is one aspect, sure, but it seems to me that the majority of the population simply doesn't care one way or the other. It's not a "killer app". Otherwise, everyone would be using something like Pale Moon by now.
  - WithinReason 4y ago
    Pressing F11 in Firefox is even more minimalistic
- trickypr 4y ago
  Hi, I am a dev on Pulse Browser. I want to clarify our current development direction (I haven't significant updated the website recently). We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster than Firefox is willing to, along with providing sane defaults. For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you could technically achieve this via patching `omni.ja`, you would need to repatch it every update. At that point, it might as well be a custom browser. Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled, but it should be disabled now (or whenever Cloudflare invalidates your cache). If you want further reading into some of the specific parts of our code that we are putting most of our effort into, here are some links: - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/blob/alpha/src/browser/base/content/browser-sidebar-js.patch https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/blob/alpha/src/brow... - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/tree/alpha/src/browser/components/extensions https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/tree/alpha/src/brow...
  - csande17 4y ago
    > We have been moving further away from privacy [...] I appreciate your honesty, but hearing this was enough for me to file your project into the "not touching with a ten-foot pole" bucket alongside the likes of Wave Browser.
    - knok_off 4y ago
      I believe that they meant, changing focus. Which is not a bad thing. Once the majority of the privacy stuff is achieved what more is there to do without making it into Tor browser?
    - trickypr 4y ago
      I think you are miss interpreting me. I don't want to focus on privacy above all else. To do that well would compromise on the usability of the browser. For example, if I were to advertise it as "privacy focused", I would not feel comfortable unless I included strict anti-fingerprinting, which would break websites. It is a balancing act, and I won't be collecting or selling your data, but I won't be competing with Librewolf or Tor for the "privacy" market either. However, at the bare minimum, we will be more "private" than Firefox by extent of including uBo and disabling Mozilla's non-critical telemetry by default.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  If you think you've turned off all "telemetry" spyware in a Firefox build, you're probably wrong.
rjzzleep 4y ago
This isn't so much a fork rather than a firefox bundle with some extensions and tweaks or am I wrong? In which it would be quite deceptive in my opinion.
- trickypr 4y ago
  Our website is a touch (read very) out of date. To clarify, we are working on newer features, like the sidebar tabs. Currently, it is a combination of a tech demo and a set of personal preferences (features, extensions, preferences) that I and the other developer would prefer. If you have ideas for new features, I am interested to hear them.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    I don't really mind it, you can do whatever you want. I just have a problem with the choice of the word fork in this context, but I guess technically you're not wrong per se. Although it's more a fork of that dot browser build than of firefox itself, is that correct?
Existenceblinks 4y ago
Firefox is already fast in a lot of ways. For example, "Recalculate Style" is dead slow on Chrome compared to firefox. I don't know how but it's night and day (over a second difference for 10k+ nodes). Maybe something to do with https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestpractices.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestprac... A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable. Edit: NVM. the tagline is "enhances focus and increases work productivity"
- throwaway0asd 4y ago
  Firefox is also faster at DOM navigation: https://jsbench.github.io/#b39045cacae8d8c4a3ec044e538533dc https://jsbench.github.io/#b39045cacae8d8c4a3ec044e538533dc You can see from that set of benchmarks (once you run them) that Chrome will top out at around 45 million ops/s in the fastest cases. In Firefox the top cases are a stress test of memory access speed. My old desktop with DDR3 reports numbers like 850 million ops/s while my newer laptop (4 years old) with DDR4 memory, both otherwise slower, reports something around 1.2 billion ops/s. Years ago when I discovered those benchmarks I remembered other users reporting as high as 5 billion ops/s. I would be curious what somebody reports now with fast DDR5 memory.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Yeah, as a developer it sucks that most users don't get the best perf we offer because they happened to use to the slower one.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  > A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable. I don’t want an internet dominated by only one web browser’s rendering engine. Not ever again thank you.
  - 4y ago
shmerl 4y ago
What would be cool to see is Vulkan based WebRender and Servo based browser.
- happymellon 4y ago
  What would be cool, is to see built in profile switching.
  - Yoric 4y ago
    `firefox -P` with a better UI?
    - happymellon 4y ago
      More like this, but supported and not requiring additional software to be installed. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
emptyparadise 4y ago
Will it keep up with security patches?
- trickypr 4y ago
  We try to keep it up to date with the latest version of Firefox. Currently it is bound to 105.0.1 but we will soon be on 106.0.5 (once PR#135 merges).
JonathanBeuys 4y ago
What I miss most in FireFox is better multiline script support in the dev console. The current solution to copy the whole script into the console every time you run it is pretty cumbersome. Also, when you opened the script from a file, ctrl+save should let you save it back with the same name. Not suggesting a name like "console-input-2022-11-13_9-36-47.js" every time.
- Zekio 4y ago
  i am almost positive i have used it recently when did it get removed? Edit I am an idiot you said better not removed...
talkingtab 4y ago
I would like to understand a bit more about this project. It is a fork of an open source git repository. It removes some features. There is some discussion in the comments about "exploring features". Are you presenting this as something for people to play with - download and throw away - or as something to depend on and use? "Pulse Browser" leads me to think the latter, but "experimental Firefox Fork", the former.
- trickypr 4y ago
  Currently it is in the "tech demo" phase. The only people I would recommend using this are people willing to contribute in some form. I would not recommend it as a daily driver hence the "alpha" tag on all the builds. To be honest, the only part that I would recommend is our tooling that we use for soft-forking Firefox/Gecko, which is where we have the most outside testers and where I am focusing most of my upstream (mozilla-centeral) patches to improving.
zichy 4y ago
What does "increases work productivity" even mean? Is this a problem with the original Firefox?
- jonas-w 4y ago
  If firefox starts to add more and more stuff no one wants to use, yes.
itake 4y ago
How fast does this get updated when Mozilla releases a 0day patch?
- pressjumpdev 4y ago
  Hey, Pulse dev here. We try to keep up with updates regularly (1 week to 2 weeks if we are busy). In the case of an exploit or critical update we try to do it fast as possible.
  - itake 4y ago
    How automatic are updates? Will it warn me when I am out of date and can update itself (e.g. clicking a button, not going back to the home page and needing to DL and install each version)?
- sys42590 4y ago
  That's a very good question. Lack of automated and timely updates made me uninstall LibreWolf pretty quickly from my Windows boxes. I won't touch this fork if its more hassle to keep secure than vanilla Firefox.
- layer8 4y ago
  It’s explicitly marked as an experimental fork.
brigandish 4y ago
Fix the terrible history page and I'll switch because it'll tell me that the dev team is prioritising the right things, existing, basic features over new, probably unwanted ones. For a laugh, check out this bug[1] for the history page, extant since Firefox 11!, that means deletion is incredibly slow and tiresome. What makes me laugh even more is that history is stored in a SQLite database, meaning that deletion should be very easy and quick but they've decided to create some horrible extraction over the top that inevitably uses Javascript of some sort. Just delete the stuff and refresh the page. Or don't, inform the user to close and reopen it themself, it would still be an improvement by a long way. Jesus wept, I know about Chesterton's Fence but how hard can this really be? As this comment by a team committer shows, the direction of the product is wrongheaded and tells me all I need to know about why FF has fallen so far behind Chrome in market share: > We understand this is still an issue, and we recognise that it is a pain point for people who do hit it. However, it likely involves a significant amount of non-trivial work to fix. At the moment our focus is on improving other areas of Firefox, and we don't have the time available to dedicate to this. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  Javascript? In my browser? It's more likely then you think.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    Pray tell why Javascript should be involved in the deletion of history entries from a SQLite database in an app distributed as a binary that is largely written in Rust. I know the answer, because it's UI update code. I don't fucking care about the fancy UI updates, delete the entries and get out of my way. Javascript in most websites is obnoxious enough, in a browser it had better be good or it's beyond obnoxious, much like your reply.
    - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
      Firefox is largely written in Javascript and a bit of C++.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
People constantly whine about chromes monopoly on HN. When someone makes a blink-based browser, they whine about blinks monopoly. When someone forks firefox ...
chironjit 4y ago
Hey, just wanted to say great work. I'm excited for innovation of a non-chrome engine and am gonna give it a try. My 2 biggest beef with Firefox is website compatibility and dead tabs. For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites. Sometimes, websites explicitly block non Chrome browsers too. So if I had to request a feature, this would be it. For the second item, I haven't been really able to pin it down. But I've seen this on both Android and Linux version. A tab sometimes goes dead, that it it doesn't refresh or basically doesn't respond when typing a new address. The solution has been to just close the tab and start a new one. Will give it a try and provide more feedback
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Don't ask a browser vendor to fix websites in 2022. We know that it's rarely a problem with the browser, and mostly devs that decided (or been told) to do a chrome only website. We did it once with IE, don't fall in that trap again.
  - chironjit 4y ago
    Haha, I don't necessarily disagree with you on this.. My only view on this is it would be nice to have a general chrome compatibility switch. I've not accounted for the feasibility of this from a technical or commercial perspective, so I can't advocate for it beyond a nice to have feature.
    - layer8 4y ago
      There used to be “Open this page in IE” browser extensions. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a similar “Open this page in Chrome/Edge”.
  - _fat_santa 4y ago
    It's even worse than that. You could build a site "just for chrome", only test on Chrome and still it should just work with Firefox. The sites blocking Firefox are doing so explicitly, because the site would work otherwise.
jacooper 4y ago
I personay think that even though Google controls chromium, its simple the best web engine out there. Instead of working on an objectively worse engine, try to influence chromium without google, or maybe even create a complete fork.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  A monoculture is fragile and will be prone to abuses.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Personally*
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BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Great news! Wish you well. Do you have a donation link? Since everyone is sharing their xmas list, here is mind: - containers builtin and improved - torrent download built in - forget site built in - tab group buit in - private tab instead of private window, like in portable ff - restore form built in - profile switcher built in
toastal 4y ago
Reasons LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/) is more interesting: • more mature • more installation options • hosted on an open-core forge, GitLab, instead of a proprietary, closed-source one, GitHub • open-source communications preferred, Matrix/Gitter, instead of proprietary, closed-source communications, Discord • website has a lot more information
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Last time I checked it was incompatible with most half-advanced JavaScript apps by default. Not what I'm looking for.
  - INeedMoreRam 4y ago
    So what is your preferred browser?
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      Firefox. Not that I'm a fan, but besides Orion it's the only browser that supports tree style tabs I'm aware of.
  - toastal 4y ago
    'Incompatible' is one way to put it. Privacy and security is set to the most restrictive by defaults Firefox offers (more in line with Tor) and users are supposed to opt into every feature that may compromise those ideals. Honestly it's helped me in some cases: spoofing its user agent, I can actually use Slack in a tab and if I disable it Slack will report I'm using an unsupported browser and block access to the chat.
- pluc 4y ago
  Plenty of obscure alternatives: LibreWolf, IceWeasel, IceCat, WaterFox, PaleMoon or just ArkenFox.
  - toastal 4y ago
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
where is the brave sympathizers who say "forking firefox is pita so the team decided to use chromium"... if these people, librewolf people can fork and use firefox, why can't brave? oh so they have problems with firefox ideologically while helping google be the monopoly is fine. okay
- voidz 4y ago
  I think Google is preventing the monopoly themselves, by throwing megabucks ($450M per year) towards Mozilla's development of Firefox.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    nope. all chromium derivates have an option to switch ti firefox but they dont
forgotmypw17 4y ago
My critique: I had to deal with about 10 clicks worth of modal dialogs before actually being able to use the browser. Distracting home screen which took about 5-7 highly focused clicks to turn off. Keeps prompting me to become default browser even after I say no. Does not allow me to set my own search engine. I think this browser needs a lot of work to live up to its claims of "enhances focus" and "hyper minimalistic".
solarkraft 4y ago
Yes! We need a de-Mozilla-ed Firefox Fork. Remove the VPN ads, Pocket and whatever other crap they're trying to push. But don't make the mistake of the other Forks of disabling almost every modern web technology. Don't rip out WebRTC. Keep JS on. Keep it usable by default.
mxuribe 4y ago
On the github page (https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser) under "Features", it cites "QR Code Generator". I'm puzzled by this feature - both for bare curiosity, but also for a browser that is intended to be somewhat minimalist. Does someone know what the use-case would be for this feature? (Not knocking this feature, just curious.)
- enragedcacti 4y ago
  I would guess its to replace or augment the "Send Tab to Device" functionality of stock Firefox so that the user can easily get the same page onto their phone or other device without a Mozilla account.
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    Ah-ha, ok, makes sense. Thanks!
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Probably to share URLs quickly with a mobile device without needing to sync things?
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    Yeah, makes sense. Thanks!
- pressjumpdev 4y ago
  Hey pulse dev here, actually the guy who inserted QR Code Generator xd. There were suggestions around adding a qr generator to the browser for sharing urls irl easily. This was also something that replaced our emoji picker as it was hard to maintain, unoptimized and we deemed this more productive.
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    Thanks for confirming! And yep, makes sense as a url sharing mechanism. Cheers, and good luck with this browser; the more diversity in the browser world, the better!
mrtweetyhack 4y ago

140 points by freediver 4y ago

Librewolf?

I'm not sure what this is offering over normal Firefox other than not having to turn off telemetry, install ublock ( and the other mentioned add-ons), and making use of user.js myself? Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".

dartharva 4y ago
"Hyper minimalistic UI"
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I'm glad to see someone still has the courage to work on browsers - which is increasingly declared "infeasible". Well done. > We have been moving further away from privacy and towards But sorry, I literally stopped reading at that point. The only feature that people want and need from browsers, and the only reason to even glance twice at yet another Firefox fork is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing. There is enormous scope here to add value - adding client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration. How about starting with a browser that can remember your privacy settings, instead of silently "updating" and defaulting back to the worst possible settings as Firefox does? Having the latest (probably broken and more privacy invasive) presentation features would be very low on my list.
  - kristiandupont 4y ago
    >The only feature that people want [...] Well, not me.
  - chrismonsanto 4y ago
    > The only feature that people want and need from browsers ... is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing. ... client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration That's what you're interested in at least, I don't care about these features and if it was up to me the #1 priority for Firefox developers would be making desktop mode persistent by-site on Android
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      Anyway, once again, well done. It seems to me that mainstream "web browsers" have become new "operating systems", but without the visbility, structure and purpose of actual operating systems.
      - agileAlligator 4y ago
        I'll say this to anyone who will listen, we need to stop treating browsers as OS'. Whatever happened to good old desktop applications?
  - latexr 4y ago
    > I'm glad to see someone still has the courage to work on browsers - which is increasingly declared "infeasible". It’s new browser engines which are increasingly declared unfeasible. Browsers themselves are a dime a dozen.
  - agileAlligator 4y ago
    > adding client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration. How many people really care or even know about these things? 1 percent of the populace? Privacy is one aspect, sure, but it seems to me that the majority of the population simply doesn't care one way or the other. It's not a "killer app". Otherwise, everyone would be using something like Pale Moon by now.
- WithinReason 4y ago
  Pressing F11 in Firefox is even more minimalistic
trickypr 4y ago
Hi, I am a dev on Pulse Browser. I want to clarify our current development direction (I haven't significant updated the website recently). We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster than Firefox is willing to, along with providing sane defaults. For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you could technically achieve this via patching `omni.ja`, you would need to repatch it every update. At that point, it might as well be a custom browser. Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled, but it should be disabled now (or whenever Cloudflare invalidates your cache). If you want further reading into some of the specific parts of our code that we are putting most of our effort into, here are some links: - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/blob/alpha/src/browser/base/content/browser-sidebar-js.patch https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/blob/alpha/src/brow... - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/tree/alpha/src/browser/components/extensions https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/tree/alpha/src/brow...
- csande17 4y ago
  > We have been moving further away from privacy [...] I appreciate your honesty, but hearing this was enough for me to file your project into the "not touching with a ten-foot pole" bucket alongside the likes of Wave Browser.
  - knok_off 4y ago
    I believe that they meant, changing focus. Which is not a bad thing. Once the majority of the privacy stuff is achieved what more is there to do without making it into Tor browser?
  - trickypr 4y ago
    I think you are miss interpreting me. I don't want to focus on privacy above all else. To do that well would compromise on the usability of the browser. For example, if I were to advertise it as "privacy focused", I would not feel comfortable unless I included strict anti-fingerprinting, which would break websites. It is a balancing act, and I won't be collecting or selling your data, but I won't be competing with Librewolf or Tor for the "privacy" market either. However, at the bare minimum, we will be more "private" than Firefox by extent of including uBo and disabling Mozilla's non-critical telemetry by default.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
If you think you've turned off all "telemetry" spyware in a Firefox build, you're probably wrong.

rjzzleep 4y ago

This isn't so much a fork rather than a firefox bundle with some extensions and tweaks or am I wrong? In which it would be quite deceptive in my opinion.

trickypr 4y ago
Our website is a touch (read very) out of date. To clarify, we are working on newer features, like the sidebar tabs. Currently, it is a combination of a tech demo and a set of personal preferences (features, extensions, preferences) that I and the other developer would prefer. If you have ideas for new features, I am interested to hear them.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  I don't really mind it, you can do whatever you want. I just have a problem with the choice of the word fork in this context, but I guess technically you're not wrong per se. Although it's more a fork of that dot browser build than of firefox itself, is that correct?

Existenceblinks 4y ago

Firefox is already fast in a lot of ways. For example, "Recalculate Style" is dead slow on Chrome compared to firefox. I don't know how but it's night and day (over a second difference for 10k+ nodes). Maybe something to do with https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestpractices.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestprac... A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable. Edit: NVM. the tagline is "enhances focus and increases work productivity"

throwaway0asd 4y ago
Firefox is also faster at DOM navigation: https://jsbench.github.io/#b39045cacae8d8c4a3ec044e538533dc https://jsbench.github.io/#b39045cacae8d8c4a3ec044e538533dc You can see from that set of benchmarks (once you run them) that Chrome will top out at around 45 million ops/s in the fastest cases. In Firefox the top cases are a stress test of memory access speed. My old desktop with DDR3 reports numbers like 850 million ops/s while my newer laptop (4 years old) with DDR4 memory, both otherwise slower, reports something around 1.2 billion ops/s. Years ago when I discovered those benchmarks I remembered other users reporting as high as 5 billion ops/s. I would be curious what somebody reports now with fast DDR5 memory.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Yeah, as a developer it sucks that most users don't get the best perf we offer because they happened to use to the slower one.
hnlmorg 4y ago
> A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable. I don’t want an internet dominated by only one web browser’s rendering engine. Not ever again thank you.
- 4y ago

shmerl 4y ago

What would be cool to see is Vulkan based WebRender and Servo based browser.

happymellon 4y ago
What would be cool, is to see built in profile switching.
- Yoric 4y ago
  `firefox -P` with a better UI?
  - happymellon 4y ago
    More like this, but supported and not requiring additional software to be installed. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

emptyparadise 4y ago

Will it keep up with security patches?

trickypr 4y ago
We try to keep it up to date with the latest version of Firefox. Currently it is bound to 105.0.1 but we will soon be on 106.0.5 (once PR#135 merges).

JonathanBeuys 4y ago

What I miss most in FireFox is better multiline script support in the dev console. The current solution to copy the whole script into the console every time you run it is pretty cumbersome. Also, when you opened the script from a file, ctrl+save should let you save it back with the same name. Not suggesting a name like "console-input-2022-11-13_9-36-47.js" every time.

Zekio 4y ago
i am almost positive i have used it recently when did it get removed? Edit I am an idiot you said better not removed...

talkingtab 4y ago

I would like to understand a bit more about this project. It is a fork of an open source git repository. It removes some features. There is some discussion in the comments about "exploring features". Are you presenting this as something for people to play with - download and throw away - or as something to depend on and use? "Pulse Browser" leads me to think the latter, but "experimental Firefox Fork", the former.

trickypr 4y ago
Currently it is in the "tech demo" phase. The only people I would recommend using this are people willing to contribute in some form. I would not recommend it as a daily driver hence the "alpha" tag on all the builds. To be honest, the only part that I would recommend is our tooling that we use for soft-forking Firefox/Gecko, which is where we have the most outside testers and where I am focusing most of my upstream (mozilla-centeral) patches to improving.

zichy 4y ago

What does "increases work productivity" even mean? Is this a problem with the original Firefox?

jonas-w 4y ago
If firefox starts to add more and more stuff no one wants to use, yes.

itake 4y ago

How fast does this get updated when Mozilla releases a 0day patch?

pressjumpdev 4y ago
Hey, Pulse dev here. We try to keep up with updates regularly (1 week to 2 weeks if we are busy). In the case of an exploit or critical update we try to do it fast as possible.
- itake 4y ago
  How automatic are updates? Will it warn me when I am out of date and can update itself (e.g. clicking a button, not going back to the home page and needing to DL and install each version)?
sys42590 4y ago
That's a very good question. Lack of automated and timely updates made me uninstall LibreWolf pretty quickly from my Windows boxes. I won't touch this fork if its more hassle to keep secure than vanilla Firefox.
layer8 4y ago
It’s explicitly marked as an experimental fork.

brigandish 4y ago

Fix the terrible history page and I'll switch because it'll tell me that the dev team is prioritising the right things, existing, basic features over new, probably unwanted ones. For a laugh, check out this bug[1] for the history page, extant since Firefox 11!, that means deletion is incredibly slow and tiresome. What makes me laugh even more is that history is stored in a SQLite database, meaning that deletion should be very easy and quick but they've decided to create some horrible extraction over the top that inevitably uses Javascript of some sort. Just delete the stuff and refresh the page. Or don't, inform the user to close and reopen it themself, it would still be an improvement by a long way. Jesus wept, I know about Chesterton's Fence but how hard can this really be? As this comment by a team committer shows, the direction of the product is wrongheaded and tells me all I need to know about why FF has fallen so far behind Chrome in market share: > We understand this is still an issue, and we recognise that it is a pain point for people who do hit it. However, it likely involves a significant amount of non-trivial work to fix. At the moment our focus is on improving other areas of Firefox, and we don't have the time available to dedicate to this. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643

amadeuspagel 4y ago
Javascript? In my browser? It's more likely then you think.
- brigandish 4y ago
  Pray tell why Javascript should be involved in the deletion of history entries from a SQLite database in an app distributed as a binary that is largely written in Rust. I know the answer, because it's UI update code. I don't fucking care about the fancy UI updates, delete the entries and get out of my way. Javascript in most websites is obnoxious enough, in a browser it had better be good or it's beyond obnoxious, much like your reply.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    Firefox is largely written in Javascript and a bit of C++.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

People constantly whine about chromes monopoly on HN. When someone makes a blink-based browser, they whine about blinks monopoly. When someone forks firefox ...

chironjit 4y ago

Hey, just wanted to say great work. I'm excited for innovation of a non-chrome engine and am gonna give it a try. My 2 biggest beef with Firefox is website compatibility and dead tabs. For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites. Sometimes, websites explicitly block non Chrome browsers too. So if I had to request a feature, this would be it. For the second item, I haven't been really able to pin it down. But I've seen this on both Android and Linux version. A tab sometimes goes dead, that it it doesn't refresh or basically doesn't respond when typing a new address. The solution has been to just close the tab and start a new one. Will give it a try and provide more feedback

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Don't ask a browser vendor to fix websites in 2022. We know that it's rarely a problem with the browser, and mostly devs that decided (or been told) to do a chrome only website. We did it once with IE, don't fall in that trap again.
- chironjit 4y ago
  Haha, I don't necessarily disagree with you on this.. My only view on this is it would be nice to have a general chrome compatibility switch. I've not accounted for the feasibility of this from a technical or commercial perspective, so I can't advocate for it beyond a nice to have feature.
  - layer8 4y ago
    There used to be “Open this page in IE” browser extensions. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a similar “Open this page in Chrome/Edge”.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  It's even worse than that. You could build a site "just for chrome", only test on Chrome and still it should just work with Firefox. The sites blocking Firefox are doing so explicitly, because the site would work otherwise.

jacooper 4y ago

I personay think that even though Google controls chromium, its simple the best web engine out there. Instead of working on an objectively worse engine, try to influence chromium without google, or maybe even create a complete fork.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
A monoculture is fragile and will be prone to abuses.
jacooper 4y ago
Personally*

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BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Great news! Wish you well. Do you have a donation link? Since everyone is sharing their xmas list, here is mind: - containers builtin and improved - torrent download built in - forget site built in - tab group buit in - private tab instead of private window, like in portable ff - restore form built in - profile switcher built in

toastal 4y ago

Reasons LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/) is more interesting: • more mature • more installation options • hosted on an open-core forge, GitLab, instead of a proprietary, closed-source one, GitHub • open-source communications preferred, Matrix/Gitter, instead of proprietary, closed-source communications, Discord • website has a lot more information

solarkraft 4y ago
Last time I checked it was incompatible with most half-advanced JavaScript apps by default. Not what I'm looking for.
- INeedMoreRam 4y ago
  So what is your preferred browser?
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Firefox. Not that I'm a fan, but besides Orion it's the only browser that supports tree style tabs I'm aware of.
- toastal 4y ago
  'Incompatible' is one way to put it. Privacy and security is set to the most restrictive by defaults Firefox offers (more in line with Tor) and users are supposed to opt into every feature that may compromise those ideals. Honestly it's helped me in some cases: spoofing its user agent, I can actually use Slack in a tab and if I disable it Slack will report I'm using an unsupported browser and block access to the chat.
pluc 4y ago
Plenty of obscure alternatives: LibreWolf, IceWeasel, IceCat, WaterFox, PaleMoon or just ArkenFox.
- toastal 4y ago

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

where is the brave sympathizers who say "forking firefox is pita so the team decided to use chromium"... if these people, librewolf people can fork and use firefox, why can't brave? oh so they have problems with firefox ideologically while helping google be the monopoly is fine. okay

voidz 4y ago
I think Google is preventing the monopoly themselves, by throwing megabucks ($450M per year) towards Mozilla's development of Firefox.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  nope. all chromium derivates have an option to switch ti firefox but they dont

forgotmypw17 4y ago

My critique: I had to deal with about 10 clicks worth of modal dialogs before actually being able to use the browser. Distracting home screen which took about 5-7 highly focused clicks to turn off. Keeps prompting me to become default browser even after I say no. Does not allow me to set my own search engine. I think this browser needs a lot of work to live up to its claims of "enhances focus" and "hyper minimalistic".

solarkraft 4y ago

Yes! We need a de-Mozilla-ed Firefox Fork. Remove the VPN ads, Pocket and whatever other crap they're trying to push. But don't make the mistake of the other Forks of disabling almost every modern web technology. Don't rip out WebRTC. Keep JS on. Keep it usable by default.

mxuribe 4y ago

On the github page (https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser) under "Features", it cites "QR Code Generator". I'm puzzled by this feature - both for bare curiosity, but also for a browser that is intended to be somewhat minimalist. Does someone know what the use-case would be for this feature? (Not knocking this feature, just curious.)

enragedcacti 4y ago
I would guess its to replace or augment the "Send Tab to Device" functionality of stock Firefox so that the user can easily get the same page onto their phone or other device without a Mozilla account.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Ah-ha, ok, makes sense. Thanks!
rjzzleep 4y ago
Probably to share URLs quickly with a mobile device without needing to sync things?
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Yeah, makes sense. Thanks!
pressjumpdev 4y ago
Hey pulse dev here, actually the guy who inserted QR Code Generator xd. There were suggestions around adding a qr generator to the browser for sharing urls irl easily. This was also something that replaced our emoji picker as it was hard to maintain, unoptimized and we deemed this more productive.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Thanks for confirming! And yep, makes sense as a url sharing mechanism. Cheers, and good luck with this browser; the more diversity in the browser world, the better!

mrtweetyhack 4y ago