I like how Brendan Eich is running Brave, and I wish he was still in charge of the Mozilla Foundation, but I haven’t seen any plans from Brave to fork Chromium. I don’t know whether Brave is involved in the W3C committees or not.
At the end of the day, using Brave still gives more power to Google to control the web standards and further increases Google’s monopoly power over the web. I’m skeptical that Brave will ever be able to spend $300 million per year on development of a web engine. It probably can be done for a lower budget than Mozilla spends, but even if you hire developers in developing countries and minimize the overhead and infrastructure costs, and encourage more community developers to lower the costs, I doubt you can truly maintain a web browser with 25 million lines of code for less than $150 million per year.
(Let me also say as a programmer who has used JavaScript for years, I also appreciate how Eich incorporated some aspects of functional programming into the design of JavaScript; and I wish that Mozilla was being directed by a programmer like Eich who understands the technical details rather than a lawyer.)
I had an old version on my 10" Android tablet. Some sites did not work well and I decided to upgrade Firefox. It is clear. They are doing it on purpose: they have removed the tabs altogether. Instead of tabs they have come up with essentially a page that holds some information about the sites you have visited. A method which is difficult, not obvious how to use, uninteresting and just annoying. A pain in the neck.
I thought to give it a try though. After 3 days or torture, I had to install the Brave browser. I do not know how good with privacy is Brave, but I can not use Firefox on Android anymore.
It is a pity they want to shut down mozilla. This is what they are doing. The community must find an alternative way to browse, unless they decide to behave to their users.
What do you think about Servo - the engine Mozilla was developing until they gave it to Linux Foundation? What does it need to become developed well enough (also with mind on time) and what does it need to create a browser on top?
The thing that makes me stay (so far) with Firefox and/or forks of Firefox, despite all the infuriating UI changes, is not wanting to live in a world where there is only Google.
You are right. However, Still, Firefox is not usable to my opinion on Android. I use FF on desktop and L5, but since I am already on android on my tablet, resistance to Google is futile for this platform. This is how I justify the switch to Brave.
I just hope that another free browser will emerge.
I came across this topic a while ago and didn’t make much out it. But, in the meantime, I had to find a way for a group of people to reliably upload files to a normal directory tree on an intranet (VPN) server. It turns out there is, essentially nothing as simple as FTP(S) to serve that exact need. You have “privacy focused” cloud applications, collaboration tools, everything is web based and has to go through a web server, weird file object stores, encrypted data inaccessible from the server in a simple manner, …
Basically, for the exact purpose of “upload files to the server for further processing”, I only have:
SSH
FTPS
coupling of the two above
SSH is great, of course, but it draws in its own complexity in terms of ssh-keys, having to probably have real user accounts on the system, tunneling for actually comfortable use, … and all of this is something casual computer users find a bit much (especially on windows).
That leaves FTP over TLS which works like a charm. Sorry to see web browsers dropping support for it, then I have to tell my users to install Filezilla (Another piece of software we need? *Groans* )
I found a workaround that doesn’t pollute my downloads directory. It’s odd but it works so far.
Select “Save files to” in preferences.
Change a directory to where you want Firefox to store the files you want to open instead of downloading
Select “Always ask you where to save files” (this will leave “Save files to” inactive).
As a result, Firefox will pollute the selected directory instead. Firefox will not remove those files, but you can point it to some temporary directory, or empty it periodically. Yes, the inactive setting still influences the outcome.
The only downside is that extensions which save stuff automatically will also be limited to that selected directory. For example, I changed the path for SaveFileZ from “%file.zip” to “sfz/%file.zip” and symlinked my “~/Downloads/ffox/sfz” to “~/Documents/bookmarks”.
Reading this article on the evolution of Firefox’s UI/UX gave me some perspective about some of their design decisions, even though I don’t agree with all of them. It’s from the same repo as the one dcz posted in 2021-07. I’d like to incorporate different elements from different generations but honestly, that’s too much work when I would prefer a good default, especially as I have multiple devices an would need to install the customization on every one.
Yesterday I came across a broken website: a box was overflowing but didn’t have scroll bars. I overcame it using the side wheel motion and felt proud.
Oh, actually there was a tiny thin hiding bar on the bottom. What dumb design.
Fast forward to today, I realized it was not dumb website design, but dumb browser design. All scrollbars are like that - I upgraded to 100 yesterday.
Fix: Settings -> search -> Always show scroll bars.
Yes, it’s asinine. They unchecked my “Always show scroll bars” setting, which I didn’t notice at first. When I saw the lack of scrollbars, I went messing around in about:config and got it back to normal. Thanks for pointing out the setting.
Horizontal real estate is not what they should be trying to reclaim. What about those massive tabs at the top?! Thank goodness CSS still works, which brings some sanity back to FF.
I remember a version of the HP dumb terminal that scrolled left to right, the HP2626W. It was made for word processing hence the “W”. We called that model the “ET” terminals because from the side they looked like ET’s head. This was before WYSIWYG.
Yes its bad about Firefox and Mozilla. But it was bad with Microsoft in the past. And now its more bad with Google in the first case.
So Firefox is a bad option but still the least good one, i hope that it not die soon. The Future should be more bad, as an open source Browser, even if “we” have not enough time to check and understand that code right now.
We need no Code and no Browser if we choose to exchange information like in the old Days as plain text. Global access able.
Maybe we just take a step backwards, to made things less complicated.