Is Firefox OK?

Mozilla’s privacy-heavy browser is flatlining but still crucial to future of the web.

Read the whole story

 

[Timoo]

i've always used FF. but some of their UI decisions are just baffling.

what they did to the new tab page with the last UI update is truly confusing. they've always had a big edit control in the middle of the page, which acts as a search box. and i'd grown accustomed to using that, instead of the little search box on the toolbar. and i HATE using the URL control as a search because those are two separate functions. the combined URL and search control is why i hate Chrome, in fact.

anyway, they still have the search box on the new tab page, but when you start typing in it, focus immediately jumps to the URL bar and you end up typing in there, instead.

so they've created this new fake edit control that looks exactly like every edit control since the beginning of time, but behaves unlike any control that has ever existed. and why? because they want you to use the URL bar for search. why not just remove that edit control? why turn it into this cludgy fake thing that only infuriates me?

other than that...fine browser.

Every day you learn something new.

I've got a pinned tab with DuckDuckGo, which is my primary & only search engine. So I never bothered to use the "new tab" function. In any browser, btw. I dislike those pages.

FireFox: My preferred browser ever since Phoenix, I guess. I've "cheated" a little with Chrome, in the beginning of Chrome, but turned back as soon as that thing became a resource hog. Stayed with FF ever since.

And reading this article, I will until the bitter end :-D

 

[Timoo]

Can we conclude that mostly only tech-savy people care about online privacy, and not the general public?

I get the impression that privacy gets a lot of attention due to the vocal minority. Seems that most people don't care, or atleast not as much to give up practicality and browser speed (which chrome is very good at).

Don't forget "default". Android --> Alphabet --> Chrome.
That belongs to "practicality", of course.
Just like Microsoft --> Windows --> Edge. Main reason IE could become Edge, paid for by Bing?, is because of Windows, of course. If not, it would have died long ago.

I would like to see statistics on how many people take the effort to install a different-than-default browser on their systems.

 

[Timoo]

No sympathy for Eich. The man voted for and funded efforts to criminalize many of his own employees over immutable characteristics. If he was a racial Segregationist I doubt he'd have as many defenders, but the two are morally equivalent.

Could you tell me more?
Who is Eich?
I've totally missed that story, probably.

 

[Timoo]

I use Firefox and Chrome, I would gladly drop Chrome if Firefox implemented a page translate function. I live over seas and that function in Chrome is super useful, and is really the only thing keeping me on Chrome at all on desktop.

Doing a search in add-ons I find 691 results for "translate".
The 3rd option in my search is called "Translate Web Pages".
And it is literally as simple as clicking on the add-on icon.