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Every time I try to use cool Firefox features and extensions to manage privacy, I wind up frustrated and lost in thought about just how good Firefox could be, i

Every time I try to use cool Firefox features and extensions to manage privacy, I wind up frustrated and lost in thought about just how good Firefox could be, if someone with vision and benevolent dictator status took charge. 1. Unify all of the various settings, addons, downloads, bookmark dialogs. They should all just be tabs, with consistent style. I should be able to "nav" to the others easily, and they should probably open as new tabs. 2. Multi-Account Container support baked in. This "containers are built in but borderline useless without more functionality from an addon" is... not great. It also means that no one seemingly "owns" containers to be able to do things like -- have static identifiers/ordering so that containers are actually portable. 3. There are Cookie management extensions, but the best is many years out of date and missing some obvious nice UX features. Many don't take into account containers. It's unclear what backup/restoring my settings will do here given, again, container identifiers don't map across Firefox instances, even when using Sync. Imagine a Firefox with proper container + cookie management support built in. The same way I have this one Firefox instance tweaked, I could declaratively or Firefox-Sync-ly have the same settings for all of my Firefox instances. Even just some tab+session sync would make my life a lot easier. I've theorized about using SyncThings and "locks" to have a single Firefox profile ACTUALLY shared across machines, but that sounds like too much fighting against momentum. I have a "money" container, my money apps open there, their cookies are whitelisted for that container, so I can start to "clear all cookies" and know that for certain sites, in certain containers, their cookies are whitelisted. This is ideal for privacy - I get to whitelist what stays, I get to isolate, I get to clear the rest of the trash at my whim. I love Firefox, but I kinda hate it. I just don't hate it as much as I do Chrome (though, god forbid Chrome ever get proper Tree Style Tabs, it might be over). I just lament how good it COULD BE. --- Ironically, I feel like the existence of a FB specific container extension is... exactly proof that Firefox itself left something on the table. --- edit: to be clear, I don't fault anyone, I understand FOSS and priorities, and all of it. But, I see what could be [with inf resources] and want for better, that's all.

midoridensha 4y ago
>I love Firefox, but I kinda hate it. I just don't hate it as much as I do Chrome ... I just lament how good it COULD BE. I could say the same about many things in the Free software ecosystem.
john-radio 4y ago
What are tree-style tabs?
- wereallterrrist 4y ago
  I'm lazy, so I keep linking this screenshot. This is why I don't / can't leave Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/81OpEOy.png https://i.imgur.com/81OpEOy.png I have so, so many tabs open. And when I need, I can reorganize in a tree structure and just collapse [other projects] tabs and leave them. Combined with "Auto Discard Tabs", I have hundreds+ of tabs open, with only a half-dozen using RAM. Works freakin' great for me, even on a laptop. (note, this is Tree Style Tabs along with a userChrome.css hack to remove the tab bar; I'm okay with this tradeoff, normal extensions being able to hide the tab bar sounds like it would lead to issues.)
- akubera 4y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... Makes a vertical list of your tabs in the side panel, and opening links from a page makes a node visually indented directly under that tab. Very nice for grouping tabs in a hierarchy as you descend through links on a topic. Useful for general browsing and for sites like Hacker News: you can middle click links to interesting comments on the home page, then you can go through them one by one, opening the article (which is another tab one layer deeper), and any other links from there, all "contained" in that tree. You can collapse the tree to save space and resume at a later time. After you're done you pop the stack back to the comments and read, right click and close the whole tree when done and move on to the next article you "bookmarked". For some workflows it's very nice.
weaksauce 4y ago
> 1. Unify all of the various settings, addons, downloads, bookmark dialogs. They should all just be tabs, with consistent style. I should be able to "nav" to the others easily, and they should probably open as new tabs. they do want to do this but they are hamstrung by money and tech debt. they are a seriously old browser with as much tech debt as you could imagine. google chrome came about only fairly recently with all the lessons learned from firefox/internet explorer/opera/et.al.. the fact that we have a multiprocess firefox was a monumental rewrite of scores of core code. I do wish firefox was better too but also it's not the largest ad revenue company in the world with a vested interest in getting ads to people as easily as possible and controlling the way that happens. The downloads and bookmarks code is some of the oldest in the entire codebase too. that's not easy to refactor.
- wereallterrrist 4y ago
  I keep trying to give a discount for this, in some sense, but it's hard as time marches on and I've seen some of those deep improvements, while also seeing UX left on the table. Don't get me wrong, afaict, Firefox will get decent wayland support, new fractional support, vaapi, etc, etc on Linux desktop before Chrome, and for that I can't say Thank You enough. All to say, thank you for this perspective. I wish I knew what to really do about it (I'm not qualified or blessed with the time for C++ contributions).
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    a lot of the ui that you are talking about is actually written in javascript so you can actually have an impact if you had the time. i've landed patches even though i haven't done any real c++ outside of schoolwork and playing.
krded 4y ago
Sounds like you thought this through, Firefox welcomed contributors
- actualwitch 4y ago
  Something tells me if someone opened a pull request to rewrite 90% of UI, it wouldn't get merged.
wkat4242 4y ago
They actually had #2. It was in the main browser but they moved it into an addon. I also have no clue as to why...

midoridensha 4y ago

>I love Firefox, but I kinda hate it. I just don't hate it as much as I do Chrome ... I just lament how good it COULD BE. I could say the same about many things in the Free software ecosystem.

john-radio 4y ago

What are tree-style tabs?

wereallterrrist 4y ago
I'm lazy, so I keep linking this screenshot. This is why I don't / can't leave Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/81OpEOy.png https://i.imgur.com/81OpEOy.png I have so, so many tabs open. And when I need, I can reorganize in a tree structure and just collapse [other projects] tabs and leave them. Combined with "Auto Discard Tabs", I have hundreds+ of tabs open, with only a half-dozen using RAM. Works freakin' great for me, even on a laptop. (note, this is Tree Style Tabs along with a userChrome.css hack to remove the tab bar; I'm okay with this tradeoff, normal extensions being able to hide the tab bar sounds like it would lead to issues.)
akubera 4y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... Makes a vertical list of your tabs in the side panel, and opening links from a page makes a node visually indented directly under that tab. Very nice for grouping tabs in a hierarchy as you descend through links on a topic. Useful for general browsing and for sites like Hacker News: you can middle click links to interesting comments on the home page, then you can go through them one by one, opening the article (which is another tab one layer deeper), and any other links from there, all "contained" in that tree. You can collapse the tree to save space and resume at a later time. After you're done you pop the stack back to the comments and read, right click and close the whole tree when done and move on to the next article you "bookmarked". For some workflows it's very nice.

weaksauce 4y ago

> 1. Unify all of the various settings, addons, downloads, bookmark dialogs. They should all just be tabs, with consistent style. I should be able to "nav" to the others easily, and they should probably open as new tabs. they do want to do this but they are hamstrung by money and tech debt. they are a seriously old browser with as much tech debt as you could imagine. google chrome came about only fairly recently with all the lessons learned from firefox/internet explorer/opera/et.al.. the fact that we have a multiprocess firefox was a monumental rewrite of scores of core code. I do wish firefox was better too but also it's not the largest ad revenue company in the world with a vested interest in getting ads to people as easily as possible and controlling the way that happens. The downloads and bookmarks code is some of the oldest in the entire codebase too. that's not easy to refactor.

wereallterrrist 4y ago
I keep trying to give a discount for this, in some sense, but it's hard as time marches on and I've seen some of those deep improvements, while also seeing UX left on the table. Don't get me wrong, afaict, Firefox will get decent wayland support, new fractional support, vaapi, etc, etc on Linux desktop before Chrome, and for that I can't say Thank You enough. All to say, thank you for this perspective. I wish I knew what to really do about it (I'm not qualified or blessed with the time for C++ contributions).
- weaksauce 4y ago
  a lot of the ui that you are talking about is actually written in javascript so you can actually have an impact if you had the time. i've landed patches even though i haven't done any real c++ outside of schoolwork and playing.

krded 4y ago

Sounds like you thought this through, Firefox welcomed contributors

actualwitch 4y ago
Something tells me if someone opened a pull request to rewrite 90% of UI, it wouldn't get merged.

wkat4242 4y ago

They actually had #2. It was in the main browser but they moved it into an addon. I also have no clue as to why...