Comment by hurutparittya

9 months ago

I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".

As a Firefox user, this exactly.

The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on.

I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

  • > I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

    I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.

    • True, it's very handy... but can't Chrome do it with a Google account ? (I really don't know)

      To me the really seeling point of firefox is being able to switch off search suggestions. Now the bar only searches opened Tabs, history, bookmarks and I can tab into them quickly. If nothing turns up, pressing Enter will still launch a search. Being able to do casual navigation without having to go through a search engine is a killer feature (and it's better for the planet).

      Not only tab but you can search directly into opened Tabs/history/bookmarks with the right %/^/* symbols !

      EDIT : Almost forgot, it only really shines with that extension that prevent searches to turn up in your history --> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...

    • > I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices.

      I would love to use that functionality, but... How?!? Once you have a gazillion tabs open on your phone, the “Open tabs from other devices” (or whatever it's called) menu item on the desktop just shows an endlessly spinning spinner. :-( So maybe via bookmarks... But where's the “Bookmark all open tabs” menu item in FF for Android???

      Anyone got any tips?

  • This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is the recommended extensions but that's tucked at the bottom of a page nobody uses anyways (everyone just googles the extension they want and grabs it from the web), but even that takes like 15 seconds once you know what setting it is in about:config. I actually don't even disable the two telemetry checkboxes because they're transparent about the data they take and what they do with it, so I'm happy to share it. You can easily do all of this in one or two minutes and it won't roll itself back.

    With Windows you would be lucky to even have a supported method to disable their telemetry, and if you do get one it will probably be through an obscure series of registry edits that will ultimately get rolled back during a system update.

    • > This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is

      It’s wild to me that this is being presented as if it’s not a big deal.

      Shows how far the goalposts have moved in this conversation.

      5 replies →

    • "by just searching "studies" isn't "just", to have to remember the option names and be certain you remember them all (and not miss the newly added ones), it's not that trivial of a hurdle

  • I don't use it myself, but Librewolf is a pretty popular fork that attempts to be private out of the box and is usually updated pretty quickly.

Agree, hopefully King Andreas can carry the torch ignited by Old Mozilla that was lost a few years back.