> Last year we launched Firefox Colorways, a new desktop feature that allowed our users to express their most authentic selves and bring joy while browsing the web
> “‘Independent Voices’ are the voices of the past and present that create a better future,” said Keely Alexis. “I chose this [analogy] as my inspiration for the collaboration because it feels authentic to me but it also aligns with Firefox and the vision that we can make the world better, on the internet and beyond.”
Jesus, can you just say "we've got themes?" No one is going to remember Firefox as the next MLK Jr because they let you turn the window chrome orange.
Does it still have the cursed text with it that says "going away in (some month soon)".
It's so stupid and confusing and baffling that I want to rage quit Firefox with this as the absolute last straw. Like wtf, you're gonna take back my color in a few months? Just pull the upsell for it? Why the hell am I having to wonder about any of this? Why on God's green earth was this done instead of spending any effort getting a SINGLE bit of unity among the Bookmarks, Downloads and Add-ons panels, all of which should behave at least rougly similarly. (Because, to be clear, I had a Firefox theme that was imperceptibly similar to this months ago before this Colorways upsell)
I don't get it. I do not do not do not get it. And now they're screwing around with another extensions menu that takes space on the toolbar but doesn't de-dupe with the extension buttons themselves (I actually can see where this Might be going, but again, zero clear comms about it).
I'm the poster boy for an annoying Firefox advocate and I'm increasingly looking at selling my laptop to build a woodworking shed because it all feels hopeless.
>Why on God's green earth was this done instead of
You are not alone. I'm starting to think something is wrong with me because I don't give an iota of a damn about any of this. I have watched people just get sucked into the rabbit hole of browsing for themes for the their browser while accomplishing exactly nothing after being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the choices. (Kinda like trying to find something to watch on streaming platforms)
Me, I have the default desktops from the OS, mobile OS, etc. I have too many windows covering my desktop to even care what it looks like. Yes, that's me, and I'm not even close to being everyone else. If this is the thing that convinces people to stop using Chrome, then fine. Spend time making the UI customizable to the point it looks like a MySpace background because that's what 99.9999% of people not me want. I'll do me, you do you.
> I have watched people just get sucked into the rabbit hole of browsing for themes for the their browser while accomplishing exactly nothing after being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the choices
When done in the physical world this is called decorating, I guess theming is just a digital version of hanging a print from Ikea on the wall. When I do this sort of thing, I usually do accomplish something, because I like looking at pretty things, doing so makes me happier, making my things prettier helps me feel a bit happier when I look at them. Whether that has value depends on perspective, though I feel if it doesn't then that perspective is a pretty dismal one. It's also a way to make an abstract and alien thing feel a bit more familiar and "one's own", and computers are plenty alien and intimidating for a lot of people.
I think the entire point is that Mozilla has depended on people "like you" to stay relevant for years and knows that's not a great long-term growth strategy compared to appealing to the general populace who cares about things like customizable themes.
Chrome isn't the most common browser on the planet because of its identity politics. It's actually addressing real needs(i.e. a default browser on common computing device - used to be reason for antitrust but w/e), rather than a loud vocal subsection of a handful of societies, so I don't think that that growth strategy works.
Given that a huge number of Chrome users probably come from societies that actively despise this kind of stuff, it might actually backfire.
Lucky for them I guess most people outside of HN probably never even read that marketing material, so I think it's more of a circle jerk for the marketing dpt.
> Chrome isn't the most common browser on the planet because of its identity politics. It's actually addressing real needs(i.e. a default browser on common computing device - used to be reason for antitrust but w/e), rather than a loud vocal subsection of a handful of societies, so I don't think that that growth strategy works.
I'm pretty sure Chrome is the most common browser on the planet because Google abused its market position in search and mobile (Android) to shove it down people's throats, helped along by bundling it with other installers. Everything else was secondary.
Mozilla could have gone to OEMs like Dell and said "We'll pay you to pre-install Firefox" but they didn't, Google did. I wonder if that would have cost more or less than the yearly bonuses the CEO takes?
Has any non-ad driven piece of software ever used this inorganic growth hack? Admittedly, it has been a long long time since I've suffered using an OS burdened with this kind of malady, but it was definitely where I learned about how apps are not as "free" as one might be led to believe. It was these types of apps and the damn browser toolbar installs that were dark-UI/hidden installed when installing a completely different app.
I don't know who has or has not used that approach, but if you're going to say "Chrome is popular because it did these things" I'm going to wonder why Mozilla didn't do those things. I remember the first time I downloaded Chrome was because I got some item in Runescape for doing that. Why didn't Mozilla do that?
Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars at minimum, very likely billions. It's absurd that they're failing so miserably, and it's obscene that their CEO has taken increasingly large 8 figure bonuses while the company has floundered under her leadership.
So alienating their last supporters and promoters will get them back in the mainstream? How will that work?
And Firefox has always had themes. Real themes. Colorways is just some coloring and it's not even staying around for these supposed mainstream users to enjoy
The moronic thing about these new "colorways" is that the company still refuses the sane default: Mostly grayish or very, very lightly tinted UI with a decently dark, contrasting tab bar. All these new themes have a lot of color outside the tab bar, but credit to Mozilla that the "soft" ones still manage more experienced contrast than their white-on-white abomination of a light theme.
Counter argument: is it actually worth getting this upset over themes?
Yes, the marketing behind it is stupid because it attempts to correlate some deeper symbolic meaning to the act of choosing colors for your web browser. But as a fellow Firefox advocate, I would rather Mozilla plays around with these sort of corny marketing concepts as a way of gaining market share rather than rely on Google's patronage ad-infinitum.
I would rather Mozilla put their time and money into actually improving on the things they _used to_ to better than Chrome and IE, like building a vibrant and diverse community, listening to their users, focusing on giving the user control over their own browsing experience, and being first to market with privacy features.
It feels to me like they just ran out of either the will or the engineers to do the hard innovative stuff and are just trying to turn Firefox into their own UX art project at this point.
> ... listening to their users, focusing on giving the user control over their own browsing experience ...
To play devil's advocate, that may well be exactly what they're doing. I've always used Firefox, but I'm aware that I'm not a typical user andmy interests likely don't align with mass adaoption.
I've said it before when Firefox has released new features that the HN crowd aren't interested in - there's not enough of you (us) for your opinions on [ themes ] to matter. And if this is a quicker way to grow adoption then it's a good thing in the long term.
I don't have access to statistics to qualify whether or not this is the case and contribute to making it harder to evaluate by turning off telemetry and never using Google ads, so I can't exactly complain.
> I don't have access to statistics to qualify whether or not this is the case and contribute to making it harder to evaluate by turning off telemetry and never using Google ads, so I can't exactly complain.
Yes you can complain. They should be well aware that their remaining userbase is very averse to telemetry.
If anything the companies going all-in on telemetry and A-B testing are making ever worse products. Like Microsoft with their Teams that gets slower and more confusing every month.
> And if this is a quicker way to grow adoption then it's a good thing in the long term.
What growth? I only see a decline. All they succeed at is alienating the users that were still using it. Not gaining new ones.
I don't care about marketing. I care about being fucking confused what it means that a colorized theme of Firefox is "going away". I'm still confused and everyone seems to just dance around it. Wtaf!?
I used to use a colorway I liked. But every new Firefox installation I added to my Sync profile would erase the color scheme, and once Firefox removed their "limited-time colorway" I couldn't even install or sync the same theme to my newly setup computers. So I gave up on installing colorways on any of my computers.
> instead of spending any effort getting a SINGLE bit of unity among the Bookmarks, Downloads and Add-ons panels
One thing I'd actually like is a reasonably powerful history browser/manager. I want to look for websites I visited in a custom time period, how many times I visited a website last month, or in January, or whatever.
It's all very poor as it stands: a very simple interface with no power-features whatsover, a fixed set of time periods to view (today, yesterday, last month), and a simple total visit count and timestamp of most recent visit.
But the vast vast vast majority of people want to interact with (places in Firefox lingo) bookmarks, history and downloads from the browser instead of closing the browser and open a deeply nested file in a database manager app and write SQL queries to get the data they want.
New colorway themes are a limited time offer because that will create seasonal excitement and users will be more likely to customize their Firefox theme if they know the other options will be taken away from them in a few months. Or at least that's product management's hypothesis for increasing user engagement.
So we're going to use FOMO to increase the interaction rate of a feature. I'm sure that looks great on the PM's quarterly review when they can point out how many users used the feature, but is it actually better for the users who were uninterested in the feature?
Indeed, I also don't even understand why they think colorways is even worth looking at when they're going to remove it anyway.
I just don't get the point. Have a feature or not. But not this temporary stuff. I suppose they think doing a "killed by Google" will make them as popular as chrome again :)
I heard a rumor about 3-4 years ago they culled engineering and expanded DEI/HR. Didn't look into it because I don't care about that kind of thing, but it seems like it could be a relevant explanation.
> “‘Independent Voices’ are the voices of the past and present that create a better future,” said Keely Alexis. “I chose this [analogy] as my inspiration for the collaboration because it feels authentic to me but it also aligns with Firefox and the vision that we can make the world better, on the internet and beyond.”
Hooli is about people. Hooli is about innovative technology that makes a difference, transforming the world as we know it. Making the world a better place, through minimal message oriented transport layers.
I observed the change in tone in Mozilla blog posts, from experts talking about their craft to marketspeak.
Even posts I should be professionally partial to, like those about UI design, rub me of the wrong way. It's often full of "creating delightful experiences" and "streamlining a seamless flow".
> I observed the change in tone in Mozilla blog posts, from experts talking about their craft to marketspeak.
I think I can explain what you're seeing here. The original blog.mozilla.org was run very much like the old "MSDN blogs" from Microsoft (think Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing.)
When I started at Mozilla a decade ago, my manager told me to file a request for my own space on blogs.mozilla.org -- which was denied. I was told that this was because blog.mozilla.org was being refocused as the "official" Mozilla blog.
People who already had accounts on there were grandfathered in, which is why some people (Nick Nethercote's blog come to mind) still had blogs on there. Obviously as those developers moved on, those employee blogs have gradually died off.
These days, if you want technical content, you'll need to look at hacks.mozilla.org for "officially sanctioned" pieces, or look at the blogs that publish to planet.mozilla.org for developer blogs (though much like blogging in general, there is much less traffic on there compared to a decade ago).
TL;DR: The focus of blog.mozilla.org is primarily corporate and marketing at this point.
Firefox used to be so extensible that what is developer tools in every browser today started in Firefox as an extension, Firebug (yes, I am aware it is slightly more nuanced, but it is close enough for this argument.)
Also for a long while one of my preferred FTP programs was just a Firefox extension.
Yes, I think Google must be punished harsher for Chrome than Microsoft was for IE, but Mozilla couldn't have done much more to eradicate their market share without losing plausible deniability ;-)
So you're telling me that if I enter ftp://blah to something expecting a secured connection that it'll work just fine no problems? Then I have to ask what the point of the 'S' really is.
>Also, FTP is still used a lot, unfortunately.
Um, like, yup. Please see my original comment on my feeling on this.
No, what I'm saying FTPS is just plain FTP over TLS connection, there is nothing special about it. When you talk to a web server, do you refer to the piece of software that does communication for you "http client" or "https client" or "http and or https <version> client"?
What I'm saying: You're being needlessly pedantic. When people say FTP, they might mean SFTP, it might talk about FTPS or plain FTP. If I read original comment correctly, it is about FireFTP, it talks all 3 commonly used flavors of FTP. Notice how it's called FireFTP and not FireSFTP/FTP/FTPS...
Me, personally, always specifically clarify that I'm talking about plain-text FTP when I talk about plain-text FTP because of how bonkers it is.
In Windows 3.11 you could choose all the colors you wanted for every part of the window rendering (and it wasn't called "limited edition" or whatever there either, and naming it limited edition in FF as in the image caption in the article doesn't inspire confidence to rely on this feature long term).
Nothing recent comes close to that, even Linux desktops make it hard to choose colors or how visible your scrollbars are if you prefer to actually see and use scrollbars (sometimes you can edit CSS files that get overwritten again each time you update your system).
KDE definitely still lets you theme like crazy, I believe including the scroll bar settings
The CSS comment sounds like Gnome. I used Gnome for fifteen years and got tired of what you're complaining about and switched to KDE eight or nine months ago and haven't looked back
KDE can be completely transformed by themes and they've also just introduced a choice of accent color for the default Breeze theme. A bit similar to what macOS has.
I really love that about KDE, the configurability.
I remember being able to add a background to Firefox' UI a decade ago. Maybe they've removed it and are now celebrating it as a new feature despite it actually being a casualty of the browser's never-ending devolution.
They actually still support legacy themes, persona themes and colorways themes last I checked, so three generations of themes. I'm surprised with how much they like to deprecate stuff
Jesus, can you just say "we've got themes?" No one is going to remember Firefox as the next MLK Jr because they let you turn the window chrome orange.
Meanwhile Firefox Android is still a slow, unstable garbage pile. How many years now since Mozilla began developing exclusively for headline writers instead of their users?
Have you actually tried a different one lately? I tried Vivaldi and was astonished at how much snappier it is. No more weird crashes on launch. No more Desktop Mode button that breaks if you hit the Back button. No more failed attempts to dismiss a tab because using your phone in landscape mode made it adjust the swipe length to six damn inches long.
I haven't tried other browsers lately. I agree that FF is less snappy compared to Chrome, for example, but I have a fast phone. I haven't experienced those issues you talk about - maybe it's just my luck! I particularly like the ad-blocking abilities of FF.
Interesting that you'd bring up Vivaldi. I think I tried it on my phone a few years back and it worked OK. But on a PC or Mac, it's the most bloated and slow piece of software I've seen. Which is a damn shame, because it has a lot of unique features.
I agree fully. It's quite nice on mobile, though. I especially like being able to automatically hide the status bar while in landscape mode to maximize vertical space. There's also the advantage that, as a Chromium-based browser, the Assistant command "read aloud" works.
Install Fennec using F-Droid, it's firefox with more extensions than what firefox for android allows. Are they ever going to re-enable other extensions on firefox android? Firefox used to be synonymous with "awesome list of helpful extensions".
I've had the opposite experience, switched to Firefox on Android after the new update because of the better performance and UI. Limited extension support is annoying, but if you get it from F-Droid or use the nightly version, you can enable a hidden setting that lets you install any extension you like.
On Firefox Nightly, I randomly get tabs that break and show an interactive version of the previously switched-to tab until you restart the browser, dragging a text handle to the left of a Hacker News comment crashes the entire browser, etc.
Sounds like you're having problems with WebRender? Maybe it's unhappy with your graphics card or something. Definitely worth filing a bug and attaching your about:support.
I used to have much more minor issues that are somewhat similar to what you describe, but they've been fixed for the last year or so. (I run Nightly all the time, on Linux, and generally have remarkably few issues with it.)
the entire colorways branding reminds me so much of that Silicon Valley scene it's hilarious. That said the themes are pretty good though, in particular the matte versions.
Does anyone remembers when Firefox was called Phoenix and it was born as the lightweight alternative to Mozilla and it was already highly configurable theme wise on basically calculators for today's standards?
I spontaneously developed cancer and projectile vomited in an impressive arc on reading their marketing copy for this stuff. Easy theming is nice, but holy fuck. Talk about saccharine.
The truth is, people using Firefox just to 'stick it to the big bad corpo' is getting us nowhere. Firefox is losing not because of Chrome but because of its own incompetence or inability to keep the users happy.
Firefox is losing userbase a lot faster than some other browsers are gaining it, is that Firefox users' fault or Firefox's?
I use Firefox because I think the sync service it provides is great and that some of the customization is unmatched, not because I think I'm some soldier fighting the Chromium monopoly.
> people using Firefox just to 'stick it to the big bad corpo' is getting us nowhere.
Don't underestimate the power of small contributions. You could say the same about people using konqueror 20 years ago, it brought KHTML which brought us webkit. You could say the same about people using firefox at the same time. You could say the same about people using linux in middle 90's, the same about GCC... I could go on showing more examples.
Simply using a software is a form of contribution: at the least it improves statistics. People making small contributions are important; small donations to wikipedia, bug reports, translations, fixing a small bug, improving a feature you need, talking with devs to guarantee a device works... I personally made many of these small contributions and although most of them didn't ended up on the "market leader project", it certainly made them good enough for people to keep using them and to encourage other people to contribute too.
Sure but we're acting as if a few people sticking to Firefox for the sake of it is going to save it, it's not. Not unless Mozilla fixes its underlying problems like the management and development roadmaps.
The fact that Firefox got backdrop-blur support in mid 2022 speaks volumes about Firefox's priorities.
I get the point you're trying to make, I use FOSS because I believe more people should be using it and if I don't, who would? But that doesn't work when it comes to Firefox. There are a lot of good free and open source browsers right now, no matter what engine they use.
If a chromium based FOSS browser gets popular enough, there are better chances of it surviving and breaking away from Google's monopoly at the same time. It does not matter what Google does with Chrome, as long as independent forks are able to exist within that same space and can get just as big.
> The fact that Firefox got backdrop-blur support in mid 2022 speaks volumes about Firefox's priorities.
Perhaps it speaks more to your priorities? I can't see anyone outside of a web developer who needed that feature 1 time or even caring that backdrop-blur wasn't implemented.
The fact that you're salty about a specific CSS property and that it's reason enough to boycott a browser speaks volumes.
> Perhaps it speaks more to your priorities? I can't see anyone outside of a web developer who needed that feature 1 time or even caring that backdrop-blur wasn't implemented.
The point is, if Firefox can't even make basic web features like blur work on the browser (that are available on even no name mobile browsers) I can't expect Firefox to ever surpass Chrome or other competitors and it's evident.
> The fact that you're salty about a specific CSS property and that it's reason enough to boycott a browser speaks volumes.
As a web developer, I 100% stopped development on Firefox because it doesn't support even the most basic features all other browsers have. Like it or not, it's an inferior product because of the missing web APIs.
You know what's better than fighting monopoly with an ideology? Fighting monopoly with an even better product that supports the ideology. Firefox is sadly not that.
> Firefox can't even make basic web features like blur work on the browser
I wouldn't call backdrop-blur trivial or a basic feature. It's non-trivial to implement and used very little. Why should it be a priority?
> (that are available on even no name mobile browsers)
What no-name mobile browser that isn't based on an engine like Chromium has implemented more "basic" features than Firefox? The fact of the matter is that large corporations like Microsoft have given up trying to implement their own custom browser engine and pivoted to using Chromium.
> it doesn't support even the most basic features all other browsers have.
Like backdrop-blur?
> Fighting monopoly with an even better product that supports the ideology.
You're trivializing browser development as if you could build a better browser in a weekend.
Of the 4 major browsers developers only one isn't a billion/trillion dollar corporation; one uses it's monopoly in search to bankroll and push it's browser, one uses their monopoly position in smartphones to force their browser on users and restricts the feature set of it's browser so as not to detract from custom App development, one threw in the towel and just rebranded Chromium, and the last is a non-profit that's financially dependent on the other three for handouts.
Judging by the massive amount of Google Chrome advertising I see literally everywhere, including billboards and the sides of buildings, I assume it's Google's fault
You are literally helping the "big corpo" doing that.
Firefox was mostly funded by Alphabet/Google to avoid antitrust lawsuits/promote their search engine, one of the best scenarios for the "big corpo" is a product (firefox) that doesn't have many users and cater to the most anti-corpo users (users that wouldn't like to use "big corpo" products anyway). At this point mozilla is just a bussiness expense for the big corpo, the cost of doing bussiness.
"Big corpo" can argue, "look we are even funding the competence", the competence need to be small but relevant enough, so while you are thinking that you are fighting the "big corpo" the reality is that you are just helping to keep firefox relevant enough that the "big corpo" can't be sued.
The entire internet discourse is filled with "Chrome evil, use Firefox". Go to any browser discussion on the internet and 99% of the thread is "just use Firefox or Firefox is the best". You would think that everyone uses Firefox.
The internet is a bubble. Reality is Firefox usage is pathetic. 32 MILLION people have STOPPED using Firefox in the past 4 years. The browser only has a 3.16% market share.
Chrome is a good browser. Can be considered objectively better than Firefox given its superior performance, equivalent if not slightly better resource usage, web compatibility and integration with the Google ecosystem (which the vast majority of internet population use (excluding niche tech circles)).
I have no vendetta against Firefox. At the end of the day, it is just a browser and that is a personal preference. But people act like it is some sort of saviour that will bring them to the light. There is such an aggressive tribal mentality with browsers. It makes no sense as all browsers look the same, feel the same and have the same functionality. Just a matter of preference given your needs, and for 70% of the population, Chromium delivers.
First of all usage of Firefox is mostly desktop. On iOS you don't even have a real choice. Just looking at desktop doubles the share.
Then you have different usage in different countries. Looking at desktop in Europe you get above 10%.
Last I'm never sure you skewed the Firefox stats are. Often 3rd party trackers are blocked and I have yet to find a comparison of client side vs. server side tracking. Not saying the Firefox numbers are wrong, just that they aren't certain.
>Unlike other forks it always has latest security updates.
Well yeah, that's how all the forks are when they start out. It's less than a year old (started in Nov 2021) so I'd be worried if it didn't keep up with upstream security patches.
That was my impression too, signing a 3 year deal in 2020 for ~$400 to $450 million/year.
> More than 90 per cent of Mozilla's funding comes from web search providers that pay for the right to be the default search engine in Firefox in their regions. According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF], $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google, we understand. These deals were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year.
I believe it's listed under royalties and also receivables in the annual report, though that does not specify Google specifically, but you can look at the numbers and figure they are a large portion if the news was accurate.
Why don’t you give power users at the very least in about:config an option to disable ALL phoning home by Firefox upon launch and exit. As it stands even with all telemetry off Firefox is extremely chatty and I’ve had Mozilla developers tell me they have no intention to fix this.
You can profile this yourself on macOS with Charles Proxy (GUI) or mitmproxy (CLI).
Until this is fixed all I can do is roll my eyes when I see the incessant privacy marketing from Mozilla.
I realized while reading your comment they actually do have the perfect button for "I wish to disable browser telemetry": the DNT checkbox
Its whole premise is "I, as a user of this browser, do not want to participate in tracking activities." I don't see why mozilla should be exempt from that intention. I'd be some top shelf :chefs_kiss: if mozilla.org honored the DNT but the browser itself didn't
The T in DNT stands for Do Not Track, not Do Not Telemetry.
Telemetry and Tracking are not mutually exclusive; both can be implemented by software developers.
Telemetry is unidentified software usage statistics from a random IP address somewhere on the Internet, generally without caring about whose telemetry it is.
Tracking is an attempt to identify who is operating the software, in order to associate that software's activity with specific human beings in a database.
DNT is Do Not Track, which means "do not attempt to identify me" — but I assume that Firefox telemetry typically isn't attempting to identify you in the first place, so making a statement about tracking with the DNT checkbox would not affect telemetry decisions.
Even better, you can manage LibreWolf updates via homebrew on Mac, and it doesn't harass you about new versions. If you browse HN routinely, you end up seeing the Firefox updates anyway, which is a good reminder to update LibreWolf. I've been really annoyed recently by software that doesn't respect my decision to update on my own schedule, or software that doesn't even let me make that decision at all in the settings. LibreWolf is a real diamond in the rough of web browsers these days.
I already update my browser at least once a week when I update all of my homebrew packages; sometimes more. If a vulnerability shows up that's so dangerous I need to immediately patch, I'll hear about it on HN etc.
Of course it is good to keep your software up-to-date to eliminate known, patched vulnerabilities. But there are enough unknown vulnerabilities out there that you should practice good hygiene on the web anyway. Auto-updates typically happen on a 1-7 day time scale, so you're vulnerable for some time anyway.
I control when my software updates because it's running on my hardware. That I control. I do not like things auto-updating and restarting when I'm trying to use them. It is a distraction from work and a sign of software doing things against my will.
While it is not a simple change, you can always modify things in about:config to turn off all (probably) telemetry on Firefox. The annoying thing is that you should keep updating the strings that is changing with updates (when they add or remove strings).
Also you can keep an eye to updated to arkenfox user.js because while using it by default probably will break many websites but they keep track of privacy updates of Firefox.
That's the problem, even with every possible option disabled there is currently no way, even through about:config, to keep Firefox from phoning home at these points in its execution lifecycle.
The telemetry settings they provided basically amount to, we'll phone home to Mozilla either more or less, depending on your settings.
> As it stands even with all telemetry off Firefox is extremely chatty and I’ve had Mozilla developers tell me they have no intention to fix this.
What data is being communicated? What about that data is harmful to you? (Genuinely asking for more information, not trying to convince you you're wrong.)
All telemetry at the very least transfers your IP address which is legally considered personal information. A browser can not therefore be considered privacy-respecting if it has telemetry turned on by default.
Respecting users' privacy at a fundamental level is important for a tool that is our most intimate window to the web (a web browser) even if you personally have 'nothing to hide'.
Burden of proof is not on the user. Burden is on Mozilla (and any browser vendor with telemetry ON by default) to prove that:
1) They are not misusing collected information in any way
2) They need it so badly that telemetry is ON by default, without the explicit consent of the user
Both of these are simply addressed by having no telemetry by default and all browser telemetry being completely opt-in.
Given that IP address is legally considered private information and Mozilla claims that Firefox is privacy respecting, becoming a zero-telemetry browser by default should be a no-brainer move to substantiate that claim, othwerise it is just empty words that further detoriate the trust in Mozilla.
It should also be noted that every browser with telemetry ON by default (which is almost every mainstream browser) is also directly or indirectly monetized by ad-tech, which does not help their case at all.
I'm sympathetic to your point of view, but I disagree.
Telemetry is a bit like DRM. Firefox strenuously avoided DRM for a long time, losing a lot of market share in the process, until it became clear that it could not stay relevant without being able to display DRM video. The pragmatic decision was either to (1) stay pure, forbid DRM, and disappear; or (2) give in and support DRM, accept that the battle was lost, and continue to survive in order to influence the battles that had not yet been lost.
The same could be said for telemetry, though it has less impact in either direction (it causes less harm, and not having it is less of an existential threat). And we (I work for Mozilla) did resist it for a long time, longer than was probably healthy for the market share, and eventually gave in. At least with telemetry it could be a somewhat principled capitulation—we are much more careful about avoiding tying together different measures that could be correlated to identify users, and we have a strict approval process when adding new telemetry (I've gone through it several times).
Telemetry is sadly necessary to stay competitive in today's landscape. For example, speed is the #1 reason that people report for switching browsers. Relying on either benchmarks or user reports for performance tuning simply isn't good enough. The signal is slow and massively lossy. We need to know what our actual users are experiencing, and whether a change had a positive impact on real-world usage or not. It's easy to come up with a change that improves benchmarks, at least a little. It's much harder to move the needle on what our users are experiencing. Without telemetry, we would make lots of changes that would overfit for benchmark behavior, adding complexity and producing very little benefit.
The other important piece: opt-in telemetry isn't telemetry. The sampling bias results in massive distortion. Being able to say "this change improves performance *for users who have opted in to telemetry*" is mostly useless. Users who opt in are going to have wildly different hardware, on average.
Opt out is much less problematic, even though it also introduces sampling bias, because in practice not that many people bother to opt out. It's definitely reasonable to argue that the opt out mechanisms should be simpler and more clear.
Though at the end of the day, it's much more important that we collect telemetry in a way that does not compromise the privacy of people who don't opt out, and (imho) we're doing pretty well there. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ gives a decent high-level overview. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection gives more of the nitty gritty detail than you'd probably want.
I appreciate your pesonal perspective as an employee of the company I used to admire a lot. It looks like we disagree on the fundamental premise
To me, the golden age of tracking is over and the privacy of the user is the new gold standard. It doesn't matter that Firefox needs telemetry to survive (and the empirical evidence of Firefox still losing users left and right does not help that case), if it is going to violate someone's privacy over it.
It also does not matter what its privacy policy is (and they can change), the moment Firefox transferred user's personal information, which is the IP address, without their consent, it took away something private from them, that can potentially be used in the future against them.
Here is an analogy. Would you accept telemetry in your apartment or a house, that is built-in and enabled by default, without your consent? Would you freak out that it exists once you find out?
The builder will then try to explain they use it only to improve homes they make, for example to understand what rooms you use and how, and that without it, they would not survive on the market because their main competitors are using it too. Would you care about that or you would seek to find an apartment elsewhere?
The browser is no different. It is the most intimate tool we use in our daily lives. People are fed of our data being used without our consent.
A privacy respecting browser simply can not allow itself to have telemetry by default. Meaning Firefox simply can not call itself privacy respecting if it is transferring user's private information without their consent, by default - no matter what the economic or business justification are. If a browser is choosing to have telemetry for economic interest, it loses the privilege to call itself privacy-respecting or 'a force for the privacy on the web'. Respecting privacy is digital, it is either 0 or 1, you can't be 0.7 privacy-respecting.
Finally, I don't buy the argument that telemetry is helping FIrefox at all. All that telemetry for the last 10 years or so and Firefox is down to less than 5% market share. It lost 50 million users in the last two years alone.
Perhaps Mozilla should consider becoming more user-centric instead and start listening to the users, instead of using telemetry. Go back to its roots of innovation and experiments, to the golden age of Firefox between 2005-2010 when we got Firebug, Ubiquity, Panorama and go back to product annoncements that excite user about the browser.
It's sufficient to identify you since there is still all other tracking data any browser supplies as part of the HTTPs connection handshake [1].
It's also not necessary to have Mozilla be the bad actor. Anyone who has access to the information in the future is a possible bad actor as they might be able to cross-reference the allegedly "innocuous" information with some future, more-pervasive data.
Assuming they tag the browser install, that information could be used to track your location history. e.g. if you move from your home network to a store wifi.
From what I understand, Firefox does tag the initial browser install in order to track the marketing channel the install came from, but after the first run it stops sending it. So no, it cannot be correlated with location history. (And if you grab Firefox from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ it won't have the token.)
You'll have to rely on your phone's OS stalk you by location. ;-)
It's not Mozilla that learns about your IP address, it's all the hops between you and Mozilla. An encrypted HTTP request typially contains the following info:
- source IP:port
- source OS (through TCP fingerprints)
- destination IP:port
- destination hostname
Now you have to consider where your packets may be diverted and who might want to do what with them.
1. X sniffs my connection.
2. X learns my address uses Firefox on Linux.
3. X sells the data to Y, whom I never visit.
4. Y correlates the IP with Z's subscriber data, and adds Linux to my shadow profile.
As the sibling said, the burden of proof is on them. They are the ones who push that on users when there's no technical need.
If you decide to visit google, that's your problem. Visiting mozilla should be optional too. Otherwise it creates attack surface area that wasn't there before.
Okay, so in conclusion, the attack vector from analytics that people spill dozens of comments on in every Mozilla thread is not unique to Firefox but rather shared with every website on the planet.
Arguments like these always reminds me of the story where some town had a population register that included religion, and then the Nazis invaded.
You don't know how or when the collected data will be misused, whether by the original owner, a malicious third-party breaching their systems, or the government (and even somewhat-stable governments can quickly turn sour, see Russia or the US's recent issues on abortion for an example).
Furthermore, at least in Europe, the GDPR mandates that all non-essential data collection must be strictly opt-in, so regardless of opinions, it's a law with which you have to technically comply (even though lacklustre enforcement allows offenders to get away), but doubly so if your entire selling pitch is based on privacy.
I agree, which is why I asked what data is being collected. If it's like, "a user launched Firefox version 105.0.1 and has Pocket disabled," I've got a tough time caring. Telemetry is genuinely useful information. But if it's like, "a user with IP 123.45 opened MyFavoriteReligion.com and spent 20 minutes at that domain" then it's bad news. So, I'd like to know what's actually being transmitted.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ answers that question, though admittedly it's not a quick answer that can be easily summarized. It's basically "a user at IP x.y.z.w launched Firefox version 105.0.1 and has Pocket disabled" where the IP is not collected other than in the server logs: "When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs."
Actual URLs are treated very carefully. The only ways I know that they could be leaked: (1) there is limited exposure via the SafeBrowsing stuff, and (2) if you crash then URLs could be swept up in the crash report and visible to privileged people at Mozilla. Or if you manually submit a profile and don't anonymize it (there's a checkbox to submit URLs that is checked by default), but you have to go out of your way to do that. There very well could be other ways, but browsing history is treated as very sensitive data for both legal and moral reasons.
Personally, I would not trust Mozilla to be unable to answer the question "has this IP address ever used Firefox?", especially if under subpoena. The IP is temporarily in the server logs, it's used for coarse location information, etc. I doubt anyone is all that interested in asking that question, though.
>While the fact that the census 1939 inquired Jewish ancestry is a well known fact in historiography its significance for the identification of individual Jews in the context of the Shoah has been disputed. The thesis argues that a population register introduced in 1939 - the People's Card Index (Volkskartei) - was essential in the identification of German Jews. Consulting new sources it shows that the collation of the census data on ancestry with the Volkskartei was ordered in March 1941 to facilitate the identification and localisation of German Jews in the context of the deportations.
My understanding, is it wasn't a census, but just info at local town halls.
The purpose was only so you could be buried where you wanted, in a preferred cemetery, Catholics in a Catholic cemetery for example, people wanted, and cared about that, back then.
But if you died without relatives... the town had to know.
> Arguments like these always reminds me of the story where some town had a population register that included religion, and then the Nazis invaded.
I agree that these questions often are asked by those being deceitful, but the reason that works is because it is a dog whistle. Something that hides in normal speech. But we can't presume that someone asking a question like this is in fact dog whistling. If we do, we only enable to whistlers because honest askers will be put off by pretentious and arrogant responses. It is better to answer in good faith until they show their true colors. Even if it is a dog whistle, others will read this public forum and go "why are they attacking someone who is just asking a question?" That gives them power. So let's be honest here.
> Why don’t you give power users at the very least in about:config an option to disable ALL phoning home by Firefox upon launch and exit.
Biggest reason I refuse to use Firefox no matter how bad Chromium is. I sometimes use Firefox Focus for doing searches on my phone and the thing is always pinging mozilla services. Some of them location related. No way to turn any of these off on what is supposed to be an incognito browser.
You feel like Firefox doesn't respect your privacy, so you use Google's phone-home software instead? Sounds kinda like "Biggest reason I refuse to use weed no matter how bad methamphetamine is" to me. Unless you're using UnGoogled Chromium and blocking requests by IP or something.
Mozilla's Firefox is the 'Google' of the FOSS world. Too big, too data (telemetry) hungry. They have even experimented with doing ads. I could go on and on.
You cannot be preaching about privacy and refuse to provide a simple toggle to opt-out of all telemetry in your software.
FYI I do use ungoogled chromium as my main browser.
Agreed that Mozilla is big, data hungry, and hypocritical.
That's why I use LibreWolf: it respects my privacy and autonomy, and I help fight against Google's growing web engine monopoly. I specifically don't use UnGoogled Chromium because I don't want to look like "just another Chrome user" when companies decide whether or not they should test web apps on anything besides chrome, or prioritize non-chrome bugs.
Seriously, give LibreWolf a shot. It's a very minimal fork of Firefox that just removes the Mozilla botnet parts of the browser, so it should be (relatively) easy for maintainers to keep it going for the forseeable future. You can install and update it with homebrew. And, y'know... you're not helping Google push around web developers with Manifest V3 ad-blocker killers, AMP, FLOC, etc.
> What I found were dozens of requests, which loaded nearly 16 MB in data. Lets break down what I saw.
> I also reviewed Google Chrome, for those interested: When I launched Google Chrome for the first time (and let it sit for a minute), 32 requests were made, and 7.26 MB of data downloaded.
Presumably Chromium would ping even less than Google Chrome.
Believe it. Firefox is kind of unbeaten in this regard.
There was a study carried out on what kinds of data leaks on browsers during launch [0] but Chromium specifically wasn't measured. I can only infer Safe browsing to be a leak point available on Chromium since it is shipped by default but I have it turned off (never needed it anyway) so I have not observed any pings related to it personally.
SafeBrowsing V2 only sends a partial hash to Google, only sending the full hash if the partial has a match. You can just read Chromium's whitepaper on their various features if you want to understand the privacy implications.
From Mozilla's point of view its probably that people might get confused between the old and new themes and wonder why all the highly customisable themes we use to have no longer work. So we have to have a new the colourways name so Mozilla can market the 'new' feature and sidestep the problem.
Do people think it's one person implementing Theming, PDF editing, and Privacy Mode protects; and that he just needs to re-prioritize his backlog?
Why can't developer of difference capabilities contribute in different ways? I'm a competent developer but I will never be kernel module, crypto, or netcode competent; does that mean I should just forgo contributing to anything?
If it's implemented by volunteers then yeah let them work on whatever they want. If it's implemented by paid employees at Mozilla then it's up to them what devs they're hiring, and if they spend their finite budget on devs reimplementing theming then that's totally on them.
I think that someone wrote the entire spiel about the life-changing aspects of changing some colours of a program without realising how plastic it sounds, when they could have written it to be read by real people, and have a grasp of perspective. Visuals and aesthetics do play an important role but people want their software to do its job: be a useful tool.
I am extremely surprised by all the negative Firefox sentiment here. I switched from Chrome as soon as manifest v3 was announced and I have been almost completely happy with it. In all the ways I'm unhappy with it, chrome is even worse.
Whenever all the negative comments come up I mostly just assume there is a silent majority that continues to be happy with Firefox and doesn't say anything. I've been using it for years with basically 0 issues.
And I'm not using it to "stick it to Google" either. Containers and tree-style tabs are a huge productivity win.
I love treestyle tabs and being able to autohide it until I mouse over, but I can't get containers to ever work as expected. I would expect when I click a link to e.g. ebay it would open in my ebay container in a new tab, and when I google something it puts me in a google container, and when I click a reddit link it puts me into the reddit container. Instead I am often still in the ebay container. Temporary containers are even worse with this, I would think opening up a new link to a different domain would put me into a new temporary container, but I am still in tmp7 or whatever the numbers have marched up to. I have regressed to just facebook container because its simpler to deal with just one container and associated issues.
Thanks for this, I had been trying every setting there was in the standard container extensions to no avail. Too bad that the way containers fundamentally works hijacks your back button, this was another annoyance I was remembering.
I honestly don't know which side the silent majority/plurality is on. What makes you think they're on FF's side? Probably vis-a-vis Chrome that's true, but there are several other up-and-coming browsers out there.
Also, TST isn't a FF-only feature now (Brave has started the rollout, Orion has a great implementation, and Edge has it also).
My personal path was decades with FF and its predecessors, then Brave because it was much, much faster. Now I'm debating between Orion (which might win on performance/battery, due to being webkit), Brave (which is fast, and is evolving its TST capability), and Firefox (which works fine, but IME is a bit slower).
I don't know how anyone browses the modern web without ublock origin. I don't even go on websites on my iphone anymore because they are unusable with the banner ads, the footer ads, the autoplay videos, and trying to gleam information from 1 inch worth of text on my phone. I blow through my datacap in no time. Like why did we make these phone screens so big, just to fit more ads?
I also use Firefox Focus on Android. Latest Android versions took away the option to NOT have a default application to open files/links, so I had to pick Firefox Focus as default, even though I immediately open it in Chrome for things I want to have a session active for.
Firefox is interesting because its roots as an open source project go back a long time and Mozilla has generally been one of the most open companies working in that space. That's lead a lot of people to identify as members of that community, which is good in some aspects but also means that you have a vocal group of people who appear to feel that having participated in a few Bugzilla issues over a few decades means that they should be consulted on every change.
Over the same time period, web browsers have gone from a hot new technology to a part of daily life for most people in developed countries, and that's created areas for conflict where someone at Mozilla is trying to figure out how to retain users against a hostile trillion-dollar company and coming to conclusions which are different than some of the more conservative members of the user community want. We saw this with things like XUL's deprecation where that feature was blocking a lot of improvements which benefit 100% of users and a small group of users felt very strongly that someone else should do the extensive amount of work needed to maintain and modernize a lightly-used feature.
I literally just switched back to a Chromium-based browser because Google Meet background features are not supported on Mozilla Firefox. Everything else, I like or I’m quite content with on Firefox. I so just want to have Google Meet with background blur on Firefox, it’s the only thing I need to fully switch back.
Because we all want to use Firefox. No one wants to use Google's browser. Firefox is incredibly important software and it has squandered billions of dollars and a massive market lead. The CEO should be removed immediately and someone who actually believes in and understands the mission should be placed there.
> Last year we launched Firefox Colorways, a new desktop feature that allowed our users to express their most authentic selves and bring joy while browsing the web.
I wonder whether people who write this kind of press-releases even use Firefox as their primary browser. If you care so much about actually letting users customizing the look and feel of Firefox please just support userstyles as a first-class feature.
For anyone else being annoyed that private windows now switch their chrome into dark mode by default, completely rendering black favicons (or the toggle icon of the TreeStyleTabs extension) invisible: You can set browser.theme.dark-private-windows to false.
I don't want dark mode, period. Who decided that privacy must equal to dark mode, and that there is no easy switch in settings to turn it off?
Does the clue have to cover the entire browser chrome, though? Maybe the previous indicator was too small, but messing with font contrast of all UI elements? It seems too much to me.
The "privacy" provided by so-called private browsing mode is just a smokescreen considering how much device fingerprinting is going on. And widespread surveillance of the Internet backbone not just by intelligence agencies but now private organisations like Team Cymru.
It would be better if we spent the resources on a next generation anonymity network to replace Tor, or some kind of alternative data transport like radio or satellite, which can still be used by small niche communities of free speech activists, for example... A one way data broadcasting system, sending compressed text only, provides near complete anonymity for those receiving it. However as it necessitates buying receiver hardware, it doesn't get very much traction.
> The "privacy" provided by so-called private browsing mode is just a smokescreen
And to add insult to injury, browsing artifacts are sometimes remembered in Windows' pagefile and other parts of the OS. Even on Linux, if your distro cares to add stuff to swap, it will dump browsing sessions in plaintext to your hard-drive, incognito/private mode or not. This is why people need to use TailsOS[0] if they're really concerned about not leaving any traces.
Actually I have to add caveats to that. It looks like you could tell the OS not to swap your RAM using mlock/mlockall, but with significant caveats around overcommit that are a little over my head but which I suspect would be painful for a modern web browser to try and operate with.
Firefox includes anti-fingerprint measures, and uBlock origin + advanced mode + all scripts blocked by default helps a lot. Also first-party isolation.
Brave has a TOR mode and Brave actually runs and contributes to TOR. I honestly think it's the only browser that's doing interesting, novel things to improve web browser tech anymore.
I love you Firefox, I tolerate you Mozilla. But I’m not sure a private browsing button, and fall colors really show your commitment to “cyber security month”.
Yeah. There's nothing of substance here. All it is is a shortcut for private mode and a default to dark theme when you're in private mode. Not really noteworthy. It's a user-hostile update, even. Dark theme by default when private? I'll control my own themes, thanks. If people are unsure whether they're in private mode, put a permanent private mode indicator in the UI. And what about people who will now confuse dark theme with private mode? Their privacy story just got worse!
Marketing prose is to be expected, but this is just too much. I suspect there aren't enough people at Mozilla with the courage to tell the marketing/brand management folks to tone it down. I don't necessarily blame them, though. It isn't easy to give criticism to creative folks with a great deal of enthusiasm.
I saw the screenshot for Firefox View and at first I thought they were bringing back RSS! How slick would it be for Firefox View not to just show you the list of recent sites you've visited, but give you a preview of the _current content_ on those sites using RSS!
What I want to know is have Firefox fixed the show-stopper bug with their implementation of Private Windows yet ?
In Firefox, if I login to something in one Private Window, and open a second Private Window, my session is maintained (e.g. login to Protonmail on one, I open a second private window and I'm already logged in). So I assume Firefox is sharing cookies and whatnot between Private Windows.
Brave doesn't do this. If I login in one Private Window in Brave, the new Private Window presents me (correctly) with the login screen.
I've been through my Firefox settings with a fine-tooth comb and cannot identify anything that might be causing this. Hence I assume it is a bug.
I think it's pretty clearly not a bug. Chrome behaves the same way. Private session is cleared when all windows are closed.
I am curious though. What happens if you drag a private tab into its own window? Is state shared with the original private window? How is this communicated to the user? And what if I drag a different private window tab into the new private window? Does each tab retain it's original window?
Edit: you might be interested in the Firefox add-on Temporary Containers. You can open a new tab in its own container that isn't shared with anything else
> Edit: you might be interested in the Firefox add-on Temporary Containers. You can open a new tab in its own container that isn't shared with anything else
Thank you for the suggestion but....
"Containers are disabled .... when Never Remember History is selected in your privacy settings."
It's a miscommunication/misalignment of expectations. Private windows have privacy (more than non-private windows, at least), but they do not have privacy or isolation from each other. Unless you use add-ons, the isolation boundary is the profile. You need multiple profiles to keep them from sharing with each other.
The main problem then, IMO, is that it is not well-supported for a user to use template profiles or automation to manage or create multiple profiles with common settings. Copying profile directories to a separate user account (on platforms that allow that kind of thing) is the closest strong approach I can think of.
> It's a miscommunication/misalignment of expectations. Private windows have privacy (more than non-private windows, at least), but they do not have privacy or isolation from each other
Ok fine, but why can't it be a checkbox option in preferences ?
Why can't I tick a box that says "isolate private windows" ?
Probably. But I've never had much luck getting any traction on previous reports even when I've made sure to produce great supporting detail to enable reproduction.
I suspect you need to know the right people to get traction on Mozilla bugs. Everyone else just seems to get lost in the swamp.
If it's isolation you are really after, you can just use built-in Containers feature. It isolates session/cookie data, and there are extensions that you create temporary containers for highly configurable boundaries.
I came here looking to see if this was fixed too. This isn’t really a “bug” per se as the text on the Private Window says it does this. But I agree with you it’s the biggest issue with Private Windows. I always check if I have one open now if I want to use one and have started using Safari Private Windows more now because each one is isolated.
Shouldn't a post about a new release mention the version number? (It's 106)
I really like Firefox from a usability and features point of view. Multi-account containers are fantastic! I want it to succeed. But a private browsing shortcut and colors don't excite me. I'd love to see improvements in speed and efficiency because FF is still behind the others for me. FF is also the only browser that frequently crashes. Submitted about a dozen stacktraces already so hopefully they'll figure it out one day.
Nah. After all, we're in the world of evergreen software now, so there are no release numbers, only happy little surprises when some new feature suddenly pops up on your screen...
Better color/theme support would interest me if it extended to containers. I've searched but I never found a theme switcher that worked with containers. It would be nice to have a little more control over customizing the colors/themes based on the container you're current open on.
They don't have enough resources (developers) to implement "adding websites to desktop and running them in separate windows, as applications" support, yet they are wasting time to re-add "limited edition" themes. Not to mention video conferencing support still lagging behind, although that's not so important anymore, as it was during lockdown.
And still, I'll keep on using Firefox, as other browsers are even in a worse state.
There are things about Firefox that need attention; more UI bling isn't one of them.
Also, the Private Browsing upgrade appears to be just a theme change and a button. Most of the article is nothing to do with Private Browsing, so the title of the post is incorrect.
Whoever edited the title of the HN submission somehow made it even more misleading than Mozilla did. The original HN title was the same as the Mozilla article: "Privacy online just got easier with today’s Firefox release"
To give some perspective, Microsoft is doing better with VS Code than Mozilla is doing with Firefox.
* There are no sponsored ads every time I use common functionality (like opening a new tab)
* At least VS Code has a easily available settings page to turn off telemetry
To do something half way similar, Firefox requires you to venture into `about:config` where you get a "Here be dragons" message to scare users away from touching settings. Not only that, none of the settings are documented anywhere.
Do I trust either of them? No, but at least Microsoft doesn't market "privacy".
> At least VS Code has a easily available settings page to turn off telemetry
You sure about that? They look pretty similar to me.
- https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry.html
- "It looks like you cannot shut telemetry off 100%. These settings will
opt you of most data sharing scenarios; but not all data sharing
scenarios."
- Apparently even VSCodium can't kill it all
- https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#disable-telemetry
This is rather misleading since Microsoft has enormous guaranteed revenue streams and could afford to subsidize VS Code perpetually as a loss-leader for their other services. Saying they're doing better requires a very narrow perspective which assumes you're not competing with them for operating systems, office software, etc.
I don't love Firefox having ads but it's also literally a single checkbox which you can choose to uncheck on that page and there's a difference between showing ads and violating privacy. If you want to see a web where privacy is respected more, I'd want it to look at lot like what Mozilla does as an intermediary preventing those advertisers from collecting PII.
The titular upgrade to private browsing is that you can now launch the application directly in that mode and private browsing mode is displayed in dark theme by default. Oh and private browsing mode has a new logo. Exciting stuff.
I want to like and use Firefox. Seriously, I really do. But when will they fix the performance of the browser?
They're spending devs time on useless crap instead of being improving the engine, which clearly needs improvements. For example, I wanted to send some thousands of pictures to Proton Drive (doesn't have a sync App yet) and tried doing it in Firefox. It literally started to take all the computer RAM (my computer has 32 GB) while with Brave it uploaded the entire thing without me even noticing in the computer performance.
> It literally started to take all the computer RAM
That's probably not Firefox, but the way Proton encrypts data client-side. The browser has to do a lot of heavy crypto operations. At least that's the case with Filen.io[0]. I was told by support to have a beefy machine since the desktop web app encrypts data on-the-fly before uploading to their servers.
I don't know the technical details behind this, but Firefox always felt slower in file upload front. It was very late to the directory upload feature that Chrome had (in mostly non-standard ways I don't doubt).
It doesn't bother me to a point that I can't use Firefox, but for those who regularly upload files, I can totally see Firefox being a subpar experience.
I've noticed something similar with download speed; I accidentally discovered a while back that using wget to download the same file would run far faster than firefox.
I used to wonder the same about Chrome. Try using a Chromebook with less than 4GiB RAM. You can handle 2 simultaneous tabs/apps---if you choose them well. It's due to this behavior alone that I never consider Chromebooks; by the time you find one with enough RAM to handle Chrome, you're in the price range of a "real" laptop.
My small wish is that FF on Android supports an intent that opens a URL in a new private tab. That way I'd be able to selectively open pages from HN, Reddit or other apps in private tabs—by the way of Tasker or Automate.
I looked a bit through FF code, and there's an intent to open an empty private tab, but not an address. Alas, with my lack of knowledge about data flow in an Android app, I'm not of much help so far.
I'm super cognizant of the /dev/null that is bugzilla, but have you opened an issue about that? My stance is that I don't have influence over whether they ignore me, but I have more righteous indignation if I did, in fact, open a ticket and then they ignored me
The Android Firefox, formerly known as Fenix, has a separate tracker on Github. However I wouldn't say that it's radically divergent in habits—more of a different take on the same problem that Mozilla has very limited resources and its own vision, whereas the hordes of users have thousands of their own wishes. E.g. the Fenix' tracker finally clears out stale bugs, at least occasionally, instead of letting them ferment for many years.
Anyway, personally I came to terms with the fact that open-source devs aren't my bitches, and just accept with gratitude what they offer to the world, while abstaining from polluting the trackers even further. However, I'm not above a hopeful whisper into the noosphere.
You could also try https://connect.mozilla.org which is the official location for ideas like this (and it sounds like a great idea to me!) There's definitely no guarantee that it won't still be ignored, but at least there's a mechanism for popular ideas to get some attention.
The issue I’d like to solve is that, even with TLS, you still leak the SNI as part of the handshake. So your ISP can tell you’re connecting to google.com even if you’re using HTTPS.
Even without rDNS, they're almost certain to know of at least one DNS name that goes with the IP address you're connecting to. Even if not, they can label/categorize/group it by ISP and/or approximate location.
I guess ESNI was deprecated and removed from Firefox in favor of ECH (just found that out now). CloudFlare supports ESNI, but not ECH. So that feels like a step backwards.
I'm really liking Firefox View. Having to open the hamburger menu and click twice to get recently closed tabs (and a similar story with synced tabs) was never very convenient, having a nice full page in one click is a huge improvement.
Have you seen the browsing containers^1, including the self-destructing ones? I'm 100% not trying to lobby you out of private browsing, just wondering if you were using the mode that best fit your needs
Also, be aware that (unless something has radically changed) all private windows share state with one another, which to the very best of my knowledge isn't true for the browser containers
when i start my machine, the first firefox window i open is the normal window + containers for email and some other website.
i open private browsing window.
then i go about with my day. any website i have to sign in, like hn, the passwords are saved in firefox so it is just a 2 step process usually. sometimes some website asks for an otp, email or mobile which is a pain but fine.
i can access youtube or whatever, amazon or something else and once a window has too many open tabs, i create a new window and pick up the work from there.
i like how i can close the private windows and everything gets logged out automatically. No stored prefs, no history, no records on my machine, no recomendations say on youtube based on my previous search history or browsing history. Same for amazon. I can search for any darn thing all day and i don't sign in unless i have to actually order something and if i do, i sign in, order and sign out.
This has served me well since 2010 at least and firefox with ABP+noscript at first but then ublock origin....
i am not really concerned about "isp tracking" or google analytics, i have a pihole installed which takes care of most of the things.
>all private windows share state with one another
yes. my understanding is that is a feature because as i said, i can open youtube and continue the thread if i open too many tabs (unless i want to close all of them) . the upside of this is, unless one window is open "ctrl+shift+t" works on firefox but not on chromium based browsers and private window. that is a 100% useful feature because i do not rely on browser history for my surfing so if i make a mistake, ctrl+shift+t and i am back.
edit: i log in to HN 3-4 times a day because of this. sometimes once, sometimes 4 times, depending. that is not a bother
Everything is a social movement these days. TV Shows, movies, games, apps, social media, news, ads. Can't even get a cup of coffee without getting some social uplifting messaging shoved down my throat.
Why do people get so worked up about messaging that isn't targeted at them? Mozilla is trying to gain broad appeal beyond mom's basement. There's a certain group of people that this message resonates with.
Clearly not, based on browser trends over time. The real problem is that they aren't even able to keep the low hanging fruit (i.e. "Mom's basement" dwellers), let alone whoever this other audience is.
but that was the plan... part of the great shift from freedom in software, to open source code.
"is mozilla about open software? or was it about that old RMS (yuck) what was it? looked like a joke... gnu is not gnu?? wut"
/angry-snark
just trying to vent some frustration...
edit: I actually believe that software should guarantee freedom, but I've understood that gnu's play failed, copyright is not the side of freedom of individuals, but on the side of freedom for corporations-as-individuals. my own ignorant opinion (because I'm just guessing) is taboo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33248402
God this marketing is exactly why I still use Chromium. Not only is it faster but it is just as secure and private as Firefox without all the BS and cult.
Seems to not be tabs in the style of a tree, which is exactly what I'm using Tree Style Tab for ;) Vivaldi just does grouping which is not enough for me. Also should be on the side rather than keeping the tabs below/above the content.
Everyone in this thread complaining about colorways has got to be a meta-commentary on bikeshedding. This feature isn't for you.
But anyway, I'm sad that HTTPS default and isolated cookies are turned on only for Private Browsing (sorry, "Guest Session" from that other silly HN thread, "private" apparently implies you have a rank in the military while using) when both these features aren't super disruptive for general browsing.
I think you should re-read the complaints with slightly more empathy for both sides. I love my purple Firefox (apparently via Colorways). Meanwhile, the "Colorways" feature UX and messaging is stupid and confusing. I'm not exaggerating, me and others are quite confused about what it is/isn't and if it's going away. All for freaking what?
My mom sees that shit? She's gonna go "uh I don't know what Colorways is, why's it gonna go away, I'll just stick with Edge where it showed me 12 colored icons under the Theme heading and I just clicked one." Because that's exactly what I did until the slight annoyed-curiosity-purple-enthusiast got the better of me.
I feel like the scene in Zoolander when the character is befuddled and exasperatedly asks "am I taking crazy pills".
Because they wanted something to talk about social media that was fun and limited time. They were following the Nike playbook with shoe drops including the terminology. Look at the screenshot in the blog post about colorways the art is even a shoe with a basketball.
They were trying something new. Limited time cosmetic drops for browsers that get people hyped in every other context. It confused white people because of how they executed it. Live and learn I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Every non-chrome browser has to answer the question "why use me instead of Chrome" and for Firefox it's the activism. you might not like that but it's what Mozilla's got. At least it's not some crypto nonsense.
> Every non-chrome browser has to answer the question "why use me instead of Chrome" and for Firefox it's the activism. you might not like that but it's what Mozilla's got.
The problem is that Mozilla's raison d'etre used to be about technical merit and user agency, including privacy and customization features. Chrome doesn't set a particularly high bar here, so Firefox could still be about this (and in fact Firefox is still the better choice despite themselves), but over the last few years they've gone in exactly the wrong direction.
Browsers were themeable 20 years ago. Everything used to be themeable. Things like CSS show these roots in their design, but Mozilla thinks that user stylesheets are a "legacyUserProfileCustomizations" instead of a fundamental design feature now.
The whole idea of limited time marketing is to create anxiety and FOMO. It's completely anti-ethical to user-focused design.
So Mozilla is chasing Nike shoe trends to advocate for their browser via colorschemes. I'm not even saying you're wrong, and I guess I'm not even sure that's an absolutely bad idea but Christ if that's "our" play for the future of browsers and privacy, I need to start building that shed ASAP!
I get you dude, Firefox got popular because IE stagnated and Mozilla capitalized on it, Chrome ate the world because Google made a significant technical improvement at just the right time neither of which can be replicated again so long as Google keeps up their frankly ridiculous development pace. Safari only lives because a popular platform requires it.
Mozilla angling for a cultural victory in the browser war is weird but it's the only thing they and every other alternative browser has. I actually thought the colorway thing was fun when it popped up, browser did actually look fresh and new but yeah probably not gonna move the needle.
I think what annoys me is that Mozilla (like many other companies) has co-opted the "social movement/political activist" aesthetic without actually engaging in any activism.
Private browsing mode is a prime example of that. The current improvement is absolutely miniscule for the amount of bravado they perform around it - but even if you accept it's useful for some, you could ask why private browsing mode exist at all? If that mode had superior privacy protections, why not add those to the normal browsing mode?
I think by making tracking the default and having a special mode for when you really need privacy, they are sort of doing the opposite: Normalising that privacy is an exception.
Because it breaks a lot of web sites, and removes functionality that most people want for most of their usage?
I want my browser remembering where I've been so it can suggest it to me when I want to get back to it. I especially prefer my browser remembering it rather than some server knowing it, or having to re-do searches which is less convenient and means I'm telling the search server what I'm up to.
> The current improvement is absolutely miniscule for the amount of bravado they perform around it.
Welcome to marketing. This icon is a more visible change than 1000 closed PRs in the browser internals. It's Twitter fodder, and to get tech journalists to talk about Firefox.
But Mozilla deceived us by indicating they had privacy improvements for us! This particular incident is a minor annoyance, but it's an indicator of how those in charge view those of us who care about actual privacy and functionality.
Mozilla really can't win on HN, a feature that basically only exists to save one click (efficiency!) for the kind of people who consume PB regularly is very power user and aligns with their brand as being privacy focused when private mode is the thing that is always visible in the bar.
Nobody on HN seems to know at all how to market tech to a general audience and play the game of "staying relevant" so they always have something to post to social/newswires.
I, and probably many others, feel that the quality of this as an HN submission is related, but not synonymous with, the quality of it as a Mozilla communication. But it was submitted to HN, and so it will be judged as an HN submission.
But many of us also believe that, though it's POSSIBLE Mozilla is acting how you describe ("We are committed to privacy at our core but we have to publish this kind of press release to survive!"), they are actually corrupt at their core to the point where they only see privacy-conscious users as customercattle to be milked.
I believe we critics have good enough intuition to see this kind of behavior from Mozilla as a canary indicating their true nature. This is kind of an aftershock of the Mr. Robot incident. I think it's unlikely that that kind of bad judgment was not chronic and systemic.
Mozilla's problem is they have been grasping for an answer to "why should you use Firefox over Chrome?" that actually resonates with people for over a decade. The product is fine, Firefox is a perfectly capable browser. Convincing people to use it is a soft-skills problem because the only reason to use Firefox is because you like Mozilla more than you like Google which is entirely driven by Mozilla having good-feels activism mindshare and getting in being in the news cycle.
…Made less and less capable over time. Firefox today is objectively less useful than Firefox many years ago.
The continuing decline in user numbers would tell anyone in leadership that is actually paying attention that this approach is not working. And the idea that the answer to attracting normal people is renaming and pushing themes is, to put it mildly, brain-damaged. It is like nobody at that company has ever actually met a computer user before.
> “‘Independent Voices’ are the voices of the past and present that create a better future,” said Keely Alexis. “I chose this [analogy] as my inspiration for the collaboration because it feels authentic to me but it also aligns with Firefox and the vision that we can make the world better, on the internet and beyond.”
Jesus, can you just say "we've got themes?" No one is going to remember Firefox as the next MLK Jr because they let you turn the window chrome orange.