58 replies
11h42m
Not many straightforwardly positive comments here so far, so I will write one.
I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up!
My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact: it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's great.
Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this.
I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.
For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.
Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
Tab groups again? I don’t remember when exactly, but like 10 years ago Firefox already had this feature. I was using them happily, organising all my numerous tabs to a dozen of groups by theme (work, social, movies, etc). But then Mozilla decided: “Nobody is using tab groups, screw it!” and removed them. All groups and tabs were lost. Now history will repeat?
I remember, I was around back then. :) Panorama was in some ways ahead of its time. The UI was nice visually but also somewhat heavy handed / not very beginner friendly to say the least, which contributed to it being used only by a relatively small share of our user base.
We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.
It was used by advanced users. And what advanced users do? Disable telemetry;) So, I suppose the share was a little bigger but not that much.
Maybe instead of ubiquitous stupidity-tqxax telemetry we could have some neo-Nielsen families and get to pick a roughly representative sample out of voluntary, compensated users. A trusted third party contracts the victims and agregates the data. Don't ask me who regulates or pays though.
And why wouldn't it be Nielsen :) I remember when they sent me cash in the mail as a kid, fun times.
They still do that. Just a few weeks ago my daughter filled out their survey and got $5!
That's so cool, mine was about 30 years ago. I had no idea they were still doing this!
Or, just don't disable (anonymous) metrics.
There's a BIG difference between tracking and metrics, but they are often treated the same, especially by "power users".
And that's why telemetry is such a brain dead idea. People then actually make decisions based upon "number of people using feature X" which is incredibly... lets just say "unwise".
wonder if we should just accept it as "voting" and monitor their telemetry experiment and spam the option we would like
Might be more accurate. ;)
You can vote for features on Mozilla Connect: https://connect.mozilla.org/
I never understand the need for tab groups, once you get above 4-5 tabs you are actively working in, whats wrong with bookmarks?
Bookmarks are perceptually longer-term than open tabs, so there may be more reluctance to save to a bookmark. (E.g., if planning a trip to Italy, do you want to bookmark some blogger's food recs for Rome, forever?)
But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.
I wrote love the ability to associate a TTL with bookmarks. Let me bookmark for 3 hours or 2 days or forever. Of course the 3 and 2 are user choices.
Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.
This is an interesting idea for a feature, that I think I would like too. I like to save things to maybe look at later and a TTL would manage automatically dropping them from bookmarks in case I never actually want to look at it later.
I add a folder to my bookmark bar. All project related tabs get bookmarked there. When I'm done, I either delete the whole folder or file it somewhere.
I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.
Bookmarks don't have tab history.
Bookmarks suck. They are slow and cumbersome to manage, especially when it's many related urls. And for working with them, I need to open them as a tab anyway, so why not stay there from the beginning?
Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or closed together (specific API references that are normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm working on.
Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.
I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups
I use Firefox's existing native support for tab groups that it's had since pre-1.0. They're called windows.
Think of it like memory hierarchies. Bookmarks are long term storage, tabs are registers. Tab groups fall somewhere in the middle, easy to reengage with and easy to put out of focus.
I think you're referring to Panorama View [1], introduced in Firefox 4 (2010). I think there are still extensions that replicate the experience [2].
There are many things different now that might make it work better this time. If not just that it's 14 years later, different UI, and the pattern being familiar from other browsers, might make a difference too. But no guarantees, of course.
(Note: I don't work on Tab Groups.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110613070035/http://www.azaras...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ is widely used, but I'm not sure if it does the overview. Other extensions do.
Panorama from Firefox 4. Also called Tab Groups.
There's also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350 filed in 2018 for restoring it, now duped against this official bug... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907090
Firefox defaults lately are awful and out of touch...
gestures for reload/back/forward? really?
several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?
a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years?
using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either!
i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead.
so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
I'm a firefox-only user, and I read your comment in two ways. It's grumpy, but also on the point! Thanks, I feel similarly. What is your main browser btw?
FF works for me in great ways, and I am highly productive with it, as long as some plugins still work: uBlock, tridactyl, foxyproxy. And for UI: sidebery, stylus.
From time to time I feel I should turn my back towards FF when they come up with new decisions in their UI, which I drastically reduce (no menu, no tabs,...), or new features, which are more disturbing than helping.
On android, I discovered 'kiwi browser' which is FF based but does not blacklist the plugins.
Man you got my hopes up for a bit there since I remembered Kiwi browser was chromium based which after checking, it still is. From there website: "Kiwi is based on Chromium and WebKit." https://kiwibrowser.com/
Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the browser, they probably can work better.
Not just that, but why would Mozilla pick the winner here? Everyone complains about the side effects of default search engines, let's not do it again with ad-blockers!
And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.
How much less will Google pay to be the default search if this is added?
but they will never say that out loud ;) so what is the official position? they don't even have one. nobody touch tickets mentioning these things. so sad how open source is so easily coopted.
i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c misdirection, now they don't even pretend.
For Android, I've been using Firefox Beta as my daily driver for over a year, it works flawlessly, and about:config is available.
They've automatically added spying by default now too. Mozilla is now an ad-tech company. Don't expect defaults to get any better.
Firefox is the only browser that freezes Ubuntu after some extensive internet use, especially with video watching. Since many years and still today.
Are you using the snap version? I don't doubt that will give a crappy experience.
I'm not sure how this contributes to the thread. This isn't a technical support forum, so it might not be the best place to discuss specific browser issues.
I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're describing.
Of course, browser performance can be affected by many factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the official Firefox support channels.
Does it freeze completely (forcing you to resort to kill -9) or is it just slow?
In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever since.
I've never used Ubuntu, but on Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed, I've never run into this issue (and I've had like 50+ tabs open for weeks since i don't really reboot my work laptop unless I have to)
happens to me too. but i would bet money it's because of memory corruption in both of our cases.
i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the default) ram, one crash every couple weeks.
so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non deterministic, it is ram corruption.
(It's happening.gif)
But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.
If you're unfamiliar with Sidebery, it's similar to TST but has a neat tab groups feature as well.
Speaking of, there are other cool new features coming to Firefox - such as vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
Thanks, sideberry looks great. I've defaulted to TST for so long, I haven't looked for alternatives, but it seems worth trying.
its good to see you giving direct feedback.
Glad to hear Mozilla is working on adding this. I switched to a chrome-based browser for a while and the only thing I miss after going back to Firefox is tab groups.
Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters. Will the vanilla implementation support it?
You should try Firefox Mozilla containers
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
This is official supported add-on
Along with the excellent "open in container" extension, allowing launching URLs into containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c...
I'm curious what the use-case of this extension is? Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom protocol handler, and if it's just for my own browser then I'm going to be creating containers and then setting "always open site in this container" and Firefox will always open that site in a specific container. What are you using this for?
I have my own xdg-open in the PATH which supersedes the /usr/bin one (I believe there actually is a plugin mechanism for xdg-open but I found it easier to just create my own binary than learn their tomfoolery), and with that in mind, I'm able to make any URL routing decisions I'd like via that
... which won't work for multi-tenant sites like console.aws.amazon.com or portal.azure.com which use cookies or other such nonsense to determine who you are currently logged in as. That's actually true of Google and Microsoft, too, although I have less day-to-day experience with that. I am, of course, aware of the user switcher built into both AWS and Azure consoles, but it's not the same as having a giant red themed container for production accounts versus green for QA ones
As for your specific question, I also use aws-vault to cook federated login URLs for the console because my experience of working with AWS SSO and Okta is some ... it's a lot of clicking ... versus letting aws-vault build the federated signin URL and then launching it into the container named according to its AccountID (so it's easy to programatically dispatch them)
This is the main reason I still use Firefox. Being able to have multiple color-coded containers for my different Azure roles at work, and being able to set a custom socks5 proxy on each container so I can route certain container tabs through a different VPN service.
Sideberry extension does this perfectly. I migrated from Vivaldi to Firefox because of it.
Same! I switched back from Brave to Firefox last year after discovering that Sidebery has tab panels (which I think Arc calls workspaces) that can be set to use the same Firefox container. I want to be logged into different accounts of the same service, in Brave I had different "profiles" for this, but I like that now in Firefox I can have everything in a single window and I can easily switch between containers by switching to a different panel. (Which I have a hotkey for)
I might be willing to try it because of these workspaces.
How does It differ from Firefox Profile Manager?
Product presentation is a hard-to-develop skill. I agree that many aspects of the page are muddy.
I personally find their compact mode the cleanest I have ever seen. This is the entire window: https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz To access the address bar, move the mouse to the top, or type Ctrl+L. For the tabs, move the mouse to the left, or type Ctrl+1, 2… or Ctrl+Tab to cycle through.
I wish Firefox had such a compact mode.
Tried Arc and didn't like it. It's main selling point is the workspaces. However, I'm not the type of person to have 200 tabs open at once, so it wasn't as useful for me as I thought it would be. It's def a nice looking app though.
If they commit to keeping all Firefox's spying out of their Firefox-based browsing UI that's all I really need. Firefox was fine, it's just stopped working for its users and respecting their privacy.