Before you come at me with stuff like Librewolf, Waterfox and IceCat; those don’t count. They are just tweaked Firefox distros with mostly basic low level changes. Not every Chromium browser is super unique either, but I feel like there are more differences between them then there are with Firefox distros. Why is that? Why there aren’t different browsers that use Firefox’s engines but provide a different UX?

  • @[email protected]
    1•3 years ago

    IDK about projects but I do know why I abandoned Firefox a month ago, after using it for a very long time - since about 2007.

    1. A year or two ago Mozilla waged a war against adblockers and added a blacklist of extensions they don’t like (naturally the adlockers were the first to go) and the browser started removing them without asking for permission first. It didn’t take long for me to “catch the trails” of that function and to silence it for good. IDK if they’re still waging that war but I have no intention to check - the roadblocks I’ve setup on my computer, my router and in the browser itself are still in place.
    2. Switching to web extensions instead of legacy. Web extensions provide very limited functionality compared to legacy extensions, thus the customization level dropped seriously.
    3. Removing the option to disable updates of the browser. This was the reason I started referring to Mozilla as Microzilla bc removing the option in question was a typical Micro$hit move.
    4. Removing the good old statusbar that so many of us had gotten used to it, getting the browser closer and closer to look like Google Chrome.
    5. Disabled the feedback function, so that the user can’t send bug reports or suggestions. This says “We don’t care about the users, we’ll just do whatever the hell we want, just like Bellamy Blake”.
    6. Did something to the function layers.acceleration-forced that caused the browser to lose its interface after waking the computer up from sleeping. That option was the ONLY thing in Linux that worked like VSync in games - prevented screen tearing when scrolling up and down in pages. I had it reported to them about 18 months ago or so - still hasn’t been fixed and I doubt they will bc they don’t care about the user experience anymore. There is a substitute in Linux through the nVidia driver (force full composition pipeline) but it doesn’t work with any browser, including Firefox, it only works outside the browser.
    7. The anti-tracking function they recently introduced is becoming more of a pain in the side than a useful thing. Because of that anti-tracking, a few websites stopped letting me in to my profile - mediafire, gamivo and a few other websites for buying games, even kinguin sometimes refuses to me let me in.
    8. Removed the right click on image function “View image details” from the context menu. This was the final drop for me. After putting up with their crap for all these years, that was too much for me. If I was gonna use a browser that looks like Chrome, I’d rather switch to that browser. So nowadays I’m using Chromium. At least Chromium has an extension to replace the missing function I just mentioned. Firefox doesn’t have an extension for that function…
    • @[email protected]OP
      3•3 years ago

      No doubt dropping XUL was a terrible move. WebExtensions are just userscripts but worse in almost every way. I never heard about the other issues however, can you link sources for those?

      • @[email protected]
        2•3 years ago

        I think dropping XUL was a great move. It was old legacy and expensive to maintain. Mozilla already has limited resources, I don’t think maintaining a redundant and complex technology is a great idea. I say burn XUL.

        But I do agree that they should have kept legacy extensions. There are a few major arguments against this:

        1. The depend on browser internals, so limit what Mozilla can do without breaking extensions. (Like remove XUL).
        2. The run with full access to the entire browser.

        As to 1 I say that is fine. I think the better approach would have been recommending WebExtensions and providing a stability guarantee, but allow legacy extensions and break compatibility with impunity. Yes, it sucks for extensions authors (I speak as a past extension author) but for the minority of extensions that need this level of integration it seems worth it. And it is arguably a benefit to make the WebExtension route more attractive to developers in the cases where it can be used.

        For 2 I call this a feature. There are already WebExtenions privileges that are basically full access so I don’t see why legacy extensions couldn’t display to the user some “fake” permissions such as “Full access to my browser and all sites” and allow it. I don’t care if they label it bright red in the store, or even hide it from search results, but please make it possible.

        I know because in the slow tightening of restrictions I maintained VimFx for a while. So sure, it was a pain fixing the incompatibilities, but it was manageable. Furthermore in that case there were very few users because you had to jump though many hoops to use the extension even after it was updated. So if this extension type was supported there would be more people helping out, lightening the load.

      • @[email protected]
        1•3 years ago

        I’ll try and see what I can find bc the most of these things were done in a long periods of time and I’m not sure what is still findable. The “View image details” in particular you can see for yourself that it’s missing. Simply open any image (except from Instagram - Firefox doesn’t detect these correctly), right click it and you’ll se there’s no such an option. There’s only “Inspect” from which you can get the URL but there’s no more the additional window where you can see image dimensions, size or just click “save as…”.

        The disappearing interface bug that was never fixed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536396

        The anti-tracking function that causes some websites not to let you in - try logging into your mediafire account. It doesn’t always happen but when it does, it will say “this form was idle for too long” and that’s it. Eventually you’ll have to change the browser in order to login.

        The disabled function - you can see that one for yourself as well. Simply open the menu, click “Help” and then “Feedback”. You will see this: https://i.imgur.com/NjvwTjm.png It’s like that for about a year, probably longer.

        The other removed features - such as status bar and disabling updates are clearly visible by anyone, so I’m skipping these.

        As for the war against adblockers (mostly), here’s an example of my about:config (I still have Firefox but it’s not my default browser anymore): https://i.imgur.com/UEIaAcf.png This was my way to disable addons removal - setting url addresses as 127.0.0.1 bc Microzilla had blocked many addons (adblockers included) for unknown reasons and when that was implemented with a browser update, I turned out with a browser stripped off of half of its addons. Even an addon I’ve been using for years (previously known as Speed Dial, now known as GroupSpeedDial) was removed and marked as “dangerous” (a complete bullsh*t, ofc, there’s nothing dangerous about it).