Parts of AT-SPI are impossible to implement under Wayland.
> Wayland has no concept of global coordinates or global key bindings. The protocol itself is designed around atomicity which is a nice concept, but is fundamentally in conflict to the need of assistive technologies to control the entire state of the desktop globally. As such, atspi methods like get_accessible_at_point are impossible in Wayland.
C++ operator [] is poorly designed: index, and index+assignment should be two different operators, and indexing alone should never insert new entries into the map.
You could (and I would) make the opposite statement: upsert should be the default operator and if you want lookup only or insert only you call different operators.
I find it annoying that I often have to reach to defaultdict in Python to get this behavior.
C++ could offer the entry API here, so you can get back a type representing the result of finding where this key would go, and then either it has a key+value pair you can mutate if you want, or it has a blank state allowing you to write a new key+value pair if that's what you want, without redoing the potentially expensive find operation to figure out where to put the new/updated pair
I certainly use defaultdict often in Python too, but not more often than the regular dict. Maybe 90% dict and 10% defaultdict. So from my POV lookup only should definitely be the default.
Lots of people are surprised that insert() can fail. And even more surprised that a RHS [] inserts a default value. I'm not a fan of APIs that surprise.
It really depends on what you got used to. C++ was the first language, which, I would say, learned. I’m still surprised to day that traversing a set is not in order by default.
In this specific case, emplace should be your default option, and you should really know why that’s the case, and why you have this many options.
Unless you are deficient it's not the vitamin D. It's a whole host of other processes that benefit your body from sun exposure and the activities that go along with it. The Vitamin D is just a marker that we can detect that can also be related to that same exposure. So there's a huge number of things for which people with high levels of Vitamin D do not suffer but supplementing has no effect because the vitamin D is only correlated not causative.
But wouldn’t this imply that optimizing the tanning bed properties for vitamin D production is worse than looking for as-close-to-sun-like sources of light?
The paper covers a lot, some are administrating vitamin D as a prevention measure, most are on vitamin D deficient patients. e.g
> Even in the small subgroup of subjects with a poorer vitamin D status (serum 25OHD < 20 ng/mL), no effect on fracture risk was observed (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.07; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.91–1.25).
> A large RCT in Mongolian children with severe vitamin D deficiency did not find a beneficial effect of vitamin D supplementation on the subsequent risk of subclinical or clinical tuberculosis.
well japan has comiket. unlike the Western equivalents like Comicon, etc. which has been mostly captured by corporates as a channel of advertisement, comiket remained a grassroots market, where ordinary, individual artists can get a booth to sale whatever creative work they have produced. this is almost unimaginable in the West.
surely that has an enormous impact on the vitality of the creator community.
I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data.
There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.
It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
It's kind of crazy that a popup like "we and our 1244 partners want to share your data to better serve you". That's the kind of dystopian event you would think only visible as caricatural SF, but it's the kind of thing one can actually see on a daily level just browsing around.
They really take the piss, even supposedly essential cookies get lumbered with hundreds of "partners" with "legitimate interests" harvesting your data.
The one and only time I ever got a machine infected with malware in my 30+ years of using the internet was when I fell for Forbes.com's request to please disable my adblocker. I promptly got hit by a trojan carried in one of their unvetted ads. Browsing without an adblocker is a critical security issue, and I will drop Firefox without a second thought if they ever cripple blockers like Google did.
Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)
- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??
+1 for NoScript. It is kind of a pain for the first few days when you have to spend 10-30 seconds reloading sites to allow the minimum needed. It is also eye opening to see how much bloat is added and how fast pages load without all the extra bs.
Thats my problem though, I don't want to have to allow the minimum for each site. I wish there was a noscript-like extension that used a public database of sorts to allow what's needed and block everything else, including things that are "needed" but suck so bad you shouldn't use the site
uMatrix, from the same author of uBO. It's been officially unsupported for years but it still works and it's UI is better then the UI of NoScript and of course much better than the incomprehensible subsystem of uBO that should have replaced uMatrix.
It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests)
There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.
Thanks, I'll check nuTensor. I'm using uMatrix with Firefox on both Linux and Android and I didn't notice anything strange but maybe some of those bugs were hidden under the normal hiccups of finding the right combination of rows with trial and errors.
Not my experience at all. I run uMatrix on every computer I have and it is awesome. Still annoyed it was replaced by uBo which is quite good, but nowhere as nice as uMatrix. Luckily uMatrix still works great.
I wish they'd just scrap the uBo interface and replace it with the uMatrix interface which is far superior.
They do different things. I'm using both: uBO for ads and hiding UI elements, uMatrix for JS. I wish that the author could support both but time is limited and I'm OK with that.
By the way, I realized that most of the tabs where I'm logged into something run inside their own tab container, so that limits the damage that any bug on handling cookies can do.
Is there a different repo for nuTensor than here: https://github.com/geekprojects/nuTensor? That one says it was archived in 2021. Or are you just saying that nuTensor is less buggy than uMatrix?
It probably won't work in new Chrome versions. I'm pretty sure it's a Manifest V2 extension (it would have to be in order to dynamically block requests in the way it does), and Chrome stopped supporting MV2 extensions this year[0].
Unusable for the commenter perhaps, based on his choices, but not unusable in an absolute sense
For example, I have been using the web without an adblock for several decades.^1 I see no ads
Adblocking is only necessary when one uses a popular graphical web browser
When I use an HTTP generator and a TCP client then no "adblock" is necessary
When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary
Websites that comprise "the web" are only one half of the ad delivery system
The other half is the client <--- user choice
Firefox is controlled and distribuited by an entity that advocates for a "healthy online advertising ecosystem" and sends search query data to an online advertising services company called Google in exchange for payment. Ex-Mozilla employees left to join Google and start another browser called "Chrome"
These browsers are designed to deliver advertising. That's why an "adblock" extension is needed
When one uses a client that is not controlled and distributed by a company that profits from advertising services, that is not designed to deliver advertising, then an "adblock" may not be needed. I also control DNS and use a local forward proxy
The web is "usable" with such clients. For example, I read all HN submissions using clients that do not deliver or display ads. I am submitting this comment without using a popular graphical web browser
1. Obviously there are some exceptions, e.g., online banking, e-commerce, etc. For me, this is a small minority of web usage
The web is usuable with a variety of clients, not only the ones designed to deliver ads
You know that your long-winded and patronizing response in no way is a solution to the problem that you claim it is for the audience you're talking about.
Why do you pawn off an obviously non-solution as a solution? What does this get you?
I use a text-only browser as an offline HTML reader
I make HTTP requests with a TCP client
There are no "false positives"
I only request the resources that I want, e.g., the HTML from the primary domain, JSON from the API domain, etc.
I also use custom filters written in C to extract the information I want from the retreived HTML or JSON and transform it into SQL or "pretty print"
There is nothing to "block" because I'm not using software that automatically tries to request resources I do not want from domains I never indicated I wanted to contact
In terms of majorities and minorities, HN commenters do not represent "almost all users"
There are some web users who are online 24/7
There are others who may prefer to stay offline
A wide variety of people use the web for a wide variety of purposes
HN commenters are a tiny sliver of "all users" and "all purposes"
As such, HN commenters are not qualified to opine on behalf of "almost all users" as almost all users do not comment on HN or elsewhere on the web. Almost all users prefer to express their opinions about the web, if any, offline
I tried switching to Ungoogled Chromium lately but had to switch back because, even on 32 GB of RAM, having another chromium process running meant that all my apps were getting killed left right and centre. Do too much browsing and VS Code gets killed. Restart VS Code and do a build and Slack gets killed. Open Zoom and Chromium gets killed.
Now I'm back to Firefox again and nothing has died so far.
Exactly. And I’m one of those that uses Firefox sync, and prefers all the things Firefox comes with, including the developer tools. The only thing it lacks is the integrated Google Lighthouse reporting.
It's definitely better than nothing, and greatly improves things, but UBO is better. Try watching a youtube video in a browser with UBO, and the android app on a network with pi-hole, etc.
Except by that point you've executed all their JavaScript. The FBI recommends ad blockers as a safety measure. Bouncing on the site still exposes you to risk.
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.
It is tough guy syndrome, because it's projecting a hypothetical scenario to performatively declare what you would do in that hypothetical, attempting to hold a third party accountable for something they're not actually doing. Try to follow the ball instead of lecturing me to relax ;)
Yeah, otherwise it’d weird the new CEO had such a precise idea of the amount of money it could bring in. It makes it sound like Mozilla definitely had either considered offers from advertisers or done the maths themselves to work out potential revenue.
And for the record, as a Firefox user, count me in with the others who would switch and just use Safari on my Mac if they went through with it!
Constantly Fantasizing? I was responding to a hypothetical based on interpretations of real statements made by the new CEO. It's a public forum for discussion. Firefox is something that is central and essential to my digital life.
I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.
You literally just agreed that you did the thing I'm describing and then insisted I was fantasizing. And you're right, it's a public forum for discussion, hence my criticism of attempting to hold Mozilla accountable for a fictional hypothetical that they explicitly said they're not doing.
I'm all for fanfiction, but as I noted before, it seems that these days archiveofourown.com is where people publish that stuff, not Hacker News. It's easy to sign up and if your fiction is creative people will give you positive reviews. But you might need to spice it up by implying a conspiracy to cooperate with Google or something.
Firefox on Android mobile is also useful because it allows extensions - especially uBlock Origin (UBO), Ghostery, No script, etc. Some mobile browsers (e.g., Samsung Internet) used to allow extensions also, but they've become crap or dropped such support, so their usage has fallen.
I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
I’ve found Wipr 2.0 has been able to block all ads (even YouTube) but it’s unable to hide itself so there are sites that block my ability to read them.
Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.
I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody.
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do.
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
(1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.
Set `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb` and/or `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` to something you'd prefer, and confirm that `browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory` is set (I think it is by default).
The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory.
That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.
Are you sure it is not malware? When was the last time you changed the profile?
Also, I have a ton of bookmarks and as I been slowly deleting them Firefox's performance has improved. This same giant size of bookmarks Chrome seems to sync out of order causing their placement to change.
Ublock origin also does slow down the browser a bit on websites that.. don't.. have ads.
Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again.
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead.
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
It's like, what's someone price to commit a genocide? There are people out there, they will stubbornly refuse to engage in such a practice, no matter what amount of economical wealth is promised. It doesn't need to be rational. Rationality is not self justifying anyway. The will to help to build better societies is only marginally rational, all it takes is people with some empathy. Rationality is just better to tackle the logistic, it doesn't provide the constraints on what is deemed valuable.
Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
> Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
I think uMatrix is the better extension. I use it in tandem with uBO.
But yeah, Raymond didn't have the resources to develop both at once and chose uBO which offered a more digestible, install-and-forget experience palatable to a wider audience.
Raymond basically said uMatrix was feature complete. But there could be bugs.
I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned.
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left?
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
Too bad arnaud42 over on XDA Developers quit supporting Kiwi, even though was Chromium. It was my favorite browser ever for Android.
Hopefully, someone will pick up the torch and keep it going soon.
You can disable all that stuff. We used to have email clients, newsgroup clients, HTML editors, etc. built into our browsers. It used to be about creating a suite of tools to meet all your needs on the web. Since then, all that stuff just moved to web apps that you access using the browser so that's mostly all that remains. Vivaldi still has an email client available. A crypto wallet isn't the end of the world. I look at it as sort of a modern throwback to Netscape Communicator, which Brendan Eich helped create.
The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool.
You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.
do you have stats on how many others that is? Because I run FF and I don't run uBO, so.. I mean I understand the feeling based on one's own situation that it would kill the browser but just like Pauline Kael thinking nobody voted for Nixon so how could he win the fact that you think it would kill the browser does not mean that they are out of touch for saying they won't do it despite it bringing in money.
Who selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
Yep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?
As a decades long Mozilla fan, who has stayed true to the fox even with the rise of Chrome, Mozilla breaking adblocking would make me uninstall the fox and never come back. I feel that many of the so called greybeards here feel similar. Once adblocking is gone, users will be too and Mozilla will fall faster than Nokia did
I think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away.
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
Not sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
Indeed, Mozilla has a particular bad habit of not listening to customers.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
I'm confused, because I desperately want pinned tabs to stay on their URL, but that's not what happens, and I end up with random URLs in these tabs because I click links. Is there a config flag I flipped without thinking?
It seems they have listened to users and allow pinned tabs to navigate to any url.
Initially this is how pinning worked, and along the way they changed it so that if you navigated to a different domain from the one you pinned, it opened in a new (unpinned) tab, which was jarring.
Now it seems they have reverted that change. So they seem to vacillate on the implementation.
Yeah, I don't get why I'd want to pin a tab and then change the url (which I do accidentally for a pinned tab every couple of weeks or so). When it's not the site I pinned, it's just...a tab?
From my experience I want to pin tabs because I simply want a set of tab available for use that remain visible when I scroll through a lot of tab headers to the right.
It's very annoying to be on a pinned tab, navigate to even just another server on the same root domain, and suddenly be pushed to another (un-pinned) tab. Even if navigate to a totally different url, I do no want to be pushed to another tab.
The enforcement of the url remaining the same should be done by myself, not the browser trying to second-guess me.
As far as I can tell, it's literally the only way I use pinned tabs (other than when I accidentally do navigate away on them due to the lack of enforcement). I have several pages I always want open (e.g. my email, a couple of messaging platforms, Spotify, the web portal for texting via my Android phone), and then I have some varying number of other tabs open that I use for anything else I'm currently using my browser for. I guess this is one of those things where everyone's preference is different, because to me, having a static set of pages I always want open is pretty much the ideal use case for a pinned tab. I can't really wrap my head around wanting to use them any other way; if they can navigate away, they're just like any other tab but harder to close, and I don't really have a use case for enforcing the minimum number of tabs to be larger than zero unless it's literally to force a specific page to always be open. I find it far more annoying to have to navigate a tab back to the state it was previously than to reopen a page from a tab I accidentally closed, so having an extra layer of protection on closing a tab isn't nearly as useful as if it also had that extra layer of protection on what the tab itself was showing.
edit: I don't see it as the browser second-guessing me as much as following what I'm already trying to do in the first place. I don't pin a tab if I don't actually want to keep that specific page open, and taking an action to preserve a state that I opted into isn't going around my specified intention, but following it.
1. Let's imagine I have pinned a dashboard url in my bank's website. After some time, I go back to it, it sees I've lost my session, redirects me to the login page, and bam, that login page open up in a random, un-pinned tab. How is that a good experience?? You might say I should pin the login url, but no, after login I always want to get to a specific dashboard page.
2. In my view, pinned tabs are not for specific urls; that is what the toolbar is for. Pinned tabs are, for me, simply a way to have the most important tabs you are working easily available. And that makes sense, because the set of tabs that are most important changes a lot from time to time. I frequently have hundreds, probably a thousand, tabs open. If I have to pin every single url I'd like to go back to, I'll quickly run out of room in no time.
So let's say depending on what I'm working in this month, suddenly I find myself using Github a lot, or Notion. Then it is far easier for me to open some of my pinned tab and just navigate to the new urls I want, rather that have to close each of them , then create new pinned tabs, and hope that if I click on something on the page that is minor, I will not be rudely pushed into another tab.
Summary: I think you are using pinned tabs for what the toolbar was designed for.
I'm not sure I understand how the toolbar can solve this problem. Unless I'm misunderstanding, I'd have to reopen the page every time when I click on the icons in the toolbar, in addition to not being able to interact with them in the same way as other tabs (e.g. using the keyboard to jump between them rather than needing to click). It's probable that the developer intent is closer to what you're describing, but I still maintain that what I'm looking for would be more useful for than the toolbar and that I don't personally have any use for what you're describing.
Maybe the difference here is that I don't ever have more than maybe a dozen tabs open total (including the half dozen pinned ones). To me, it seems more that you're using tabs for what browser history was designed for, and that you're using pinned tabs in a way that doesn't make sense unless you are using tabs in that way.
It took them AGES to finally implement tab groups and vertical tabs, two of the most requested features that pretty much all browsers browsers had at that point. They can barely hear Firefox users over the sound of google's millions filling up their bank.
Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way.
Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.
I definitely heard there was a risk of that happening, but you're right that it seems not to have materialized. I'm honestly not sure what remedy they landed on or if they are still deliberating but I think a fascinating option that follows precedent would be a pop-up browser picker in Android instead of rolling Chrome as default, as that has precedent in other antitrust cases and could potentially change the market share issue overnight.
Another interesting one would be truly spinning off Chrome, but paying a search licensing fee to them, too. Actually, that's fascinating to consider in this context, because I know that option (spinning off the browser into its own company) has been criticized on the grounds that it would be unrealistic to assume a browser can simply monetize itself. Ironic given the Mozilla criticism.
Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm
Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
Tip: the crashing is caused by certain extensions such as OneTab and All Tabs Helper which for some reason seem to cause all the tabs to load, just when restoring a session. Temporarily disable these extensions before restoring, then you can reenable.
Reading comments here about problems using Firefox is odd to me as I never run into them. I feel like people are taking about totally different browsers. I don't remember the last time I had page rendering issues or was asked to use a different browser.
I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
My favorite anecdote on this front: someone posted a comment on Lemmy, a fediverse alternative to Reddit, claiming Arch was "broken" and Linux users were delusional for thinking it was functional for the average person.
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
Most of the service sites I use are fine in Firefox running on Linux. The only thing I use that is problematic is the Microsoft 365 with Teams portal an employer uses. So I have Chromium just for that one.
Yes, I wonder if the rise of the Web Platform Tests have made browser behaviour much more consistent?
It happens so rarely, I don’t keep Chrome installed and have to download a new version of Ungoogled Chromium when I need to see if something only works in Chrome, which I can only remember doing about twice in the last year!
It's not page rendering issues, usually, since Firefox and Chrome pretty much support all the same things.
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
That happens quite often these days. Last week I was filling in a govt form (EU country), submit button didn't work in FF, so I had to resort to using Microsoft Chrome. On my company's training platform videos aren't rendered in FF. Another shitty corporate portal which shows my salary and holidays doesn't work in FF at all, completely. What else... A few smaller payment providers weren't working in FF over past two years. Ghost of the Skype before being finally killed only worked in Chrome clones. Stadia only worked in Chrome (yes, I used it and it was fine).
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
Having switched to Firefox about 10 months ago, one thing I notice is every site I visit works but a lot of sites load way slower than Chrome. YouTube is a big one.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
I've been using Orion browser (WebKit-based with support for Chrome and Firefox extensions) for quite some time and haven't had this issue with YouTube, but I've definitely experienced the same with Firefox. If it's an issue of artificial slowdowns, you'd think they'd apply it to anything not running on Chrome's engine, which makes me think it's specifically Firefox's rendering causing this issue.
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure.
Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
Usually that's because of third party cookies the government websites love to use for authentication. FF and Safari by default blocks them but both can be disabled temporarily to use those websites. Chrome is more lax on them since ad networks love cross origin cookies as well.
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
No, the decline of Firefox market share happened in the early 2010s, on desktop, when everyone switched to Chrome because it felt way faster. I say "everyone" - this is the subset of "everyone" who were switched on enough to use a non-default browser in the first place. The rest used IE or Safari, dependent on platform.
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
Pretty sure even back then, uBO was on the list of vetted extensions. I remember using it prior to 2023 (since like 2019), on my old OnePlus 6. There may have been a period it wasn’t available, but surely it wasn’t gone for too long.
I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.
Have not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.
Yeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
Given the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
You could suggest installing Firefox next to Chrome and install uBlock Origin on it. Open YouTube and show them that there are zero ads. They will likely see a contrast.
I've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.)
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
That's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day.
also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
This is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed.
I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.
My software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained
The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
This is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.
> No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.
Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.
We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".
It's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but the fact that they state the pros and cons before choosing against is considered evidence that they wanted to.
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
Don't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
> which I guess is true in a certain basic level...
Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room.
> ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet
Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission""
While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO".
But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.
To some extent I agree, but if someone is deep in the weeds of speculation, not just saying pros and cons of murder in general but also having drawn up lists of people with pros and cons of murdering each of them and possible ways of doing so, then that's starting to get a little suspicious. Perhaps not bad in itself, but suspicious.
I don't think HN comments have an irrational burning pit of hate for Mozilla. If Mozilla was shaped more like the Tor foundation in their words and actions I think a lot more people would be supportive.
There is no "HN comments". Each commenter has its own sensibilities. Some of them just saw the word Adblock from new ceo and went full defense mode without trying to understand that the guy was just talking about what he feels is good, and there is no need to come with the worst possible interpretation of each sentence.
it's not just about cloud service dependency, or his loyalty to Apple, or things like that. for important data you _have_ to have backups, 3-2-1 rule and all that. the fact he put all the eggs in Apple's bucket is beyond me.
sure i am dependent to cloud services as much as he is, much to my own chagrin, but at least i have all my data backed up??
In web development, you mostly deal with data, sometimes you need to group that data, and some of these algos can help with that.
Most useful when you work with large datasets, if you can reduce a workload that takes hours into minutes or less, congrats, otherwise, you are forced to wait the hours. Either way, job security.
But the author isn't saying we should program in any of these memory safe languages. The author is saying why don't we vibe code in C, or even assembly.
This thread moved the conversation away from the posted article quite a few messages ago.
First, Rust has lots of checks that C and assembly don't, and AI benefits from those checks. Then, a post about those checks are related to memory safety, not logic errors. Then, a post about whether that's a helpful comment. Finally, me pointing out that checks regarding types and memory errors aren't unique to Rust and there's tons of languages that could benefit.
Since you want to bring it back to the original article, here's a quote from the author:
Is C the ideal language for vibe coding? I think I could mount an argument for why it is not, but surely Rust is even less ideal. To say nothing of Haskell, or OCaml, or even Python. All of these languages, after all, are for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
It would seem that the author fundamentally misunderstand significant reasons for many of the languages he mentions to be the way that they are.
> Rust has lots of checks that C and assembly don't, and AI benefits from those checks.
Fil-C gets you close in the case of C, but we can ignore it because, of course, F* has significantly more checks than Rust, and AI benefits from those checks. Choosing Rust would be as ridiculous as choosing C if that was your motivation.
But if you don't find the need for those checks in order to consider Rust, why not C or even assembly instead?
Well, that's what the checks are for: So that hallucinations are caught by said checks and can be fed back into the LLM to ruminate on.
If you don't find importance in those checks, you wouldn't choose Fil-C anyway. But, of course, it remains that if do find those checks to be important, you're going to use a serious programming language like F* anyway.
There is really no place for Fil-C, Rust, etc. They are in this odd place where they have too many checks to matter when you don't care about checks, but not enough checks when you do care about checks. Well, at least you could make a case for Fil-C if you are inheriting an existing C codebase and need to start concerning yourself with checks in that codebase which previously didn't have concern for them. Then maybe a half-assed solution is better than nothing. But Rust serves no purpose whatsoever.
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