The post briefly mentions multi-account containers[1]. I have loved using them and regard them as a killer feature for Firefox. Very few websites support account switching. Google is probably the best example, and even then, I don't really want to log in to both my personal and work Gmail within the same session. But containers effectively and cleanly enable multiple sessions for all websites.
Like tabs so many years ago, it's the kind of feature that seems obvious in retrospect. I can't think of a hard technical reason why we couldn't have had container tabs a long time ago. I hope mobile and desktop OSes will one day implement the same feature for apps/programs.
Whoever was involved in coming up with the idea and with implementing it, thank you!
I love containers, and use them heavily, but am disappointed they don't sync to all your computers like bookmarks and extensions. Every new machine, I get to start over on the 'always open this site in work container'
This. Please add this Firefox. For people who are anal that moving from machine to machine is the same container naming and ordering (for shortcuts to launch specific containers) is time consuming to redo by hand.
Beyond that - for container users I recently started using "Temporary Containers" [0] and it's an awesome use case for disposable containers where no browser interaction is associated. It's a fantastic use of containers.
Do containers transfer if you sync the Firefox profile with rsync or something? I haven't tried yet but if I get a second machine I'd like to be able to do this.
Containers still have quite a bad UX though. It’s OK to open a tab in the desired container and load Facebook, but whenever you leave Facebook via a link, it will stay in the same container. If you eventually end up on a website you want to be logged in to, you’ll have to manually switch to the right container again.
It seems like containers are a powerful concept with multiple different uses, but the UX for each of those uses would need to be different and at the moment it’s not optimised for any of them. Maybe there are extensions that can fix this for specific use cases but when I looked it seemed hard to work out which ones I’d want.
Is that not the point though? You don't want to expose to Facebook that you have a account on some 3rd party site and expose to some 3red party site you have a Facebook accoun.
You describe exactly what I would want and expect.
Yet these days facebook will be using IP tracking anyway, it won’t matter whether you’re logged in or not, in the other containers, if you’re just logged in once, they will know what sites you’re visiting, your browser fingerprint easily identify as you, even if you’re not logged into Facebook in those containers.
But modern tracking methods go far beyond whether not you’re actually logged into some site, I’m not sure how this is much of an improvement, your IP remains the same, your browser fingerprint is probably similar enough, if not identical, for them to track you regardless of whether you’re logged in. You only have to be logged in once on the machine from one container for all the other sites you visit in other containers to track you on any site that has a presence or tracking code associated with the one that you’ve logged into somewhere else.
I work remotely and use separate browsers for work and personal stuff. I was hoping Firefox would allow me to use one browser, but it didn't quite work out like I had hoped. There's no keyboard shortcuts, so you're forced to use mouse/menus (I did find an extension to open a new window in a container using shortcuts). I'm pretty sure history/cookies are global--I couldn't delete all cookies from a container (I think there's a ticket to better support this). I was hoping to close everything from a container when I'm not working and reopen it later...this seems to only work for the tabs in the current window.
It seems like a great feature. It's definitely a differentiator. Perhaps I had too specific of an approach going in. In general, for me tabs in a window are all related so flipping windows or closing windows are the context I switch between.
I use profiles for this, I work on secure stuff and can't afford to have any chance of mixing work and my personal computing adventures. Profiles are also extremely easy to use, but it does cost you 2X memory for the separate processes. Just throwing another option out there.
What's the use case for this? You can already configure different proxies to apply to different domains. The UX isn't great though, you have to use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config
That's a really good idea. To achieve similar result, I am currently using multiple Firefox profiles which have different proxies configured. I also have separate profiles for social media. It wouldn't be bad if they made profiles work in the same way or with similar functionality like containers work (profile per tab, each tab uses different proxy etc.).
Ideally, I'd love to have Firefox handle the whole proxying or even networking part. Like have each Firefox profile use different network gateway (useful when you want to route all network traffic trough VPN for example).
There is some sort of other setting you have to enable to get them to work in anonymous mode, something like "enable extensions in private mode" or something. Even then it only worked on my old computer, when I set up my new computer and enabled the setting and it didn't seem to "take" and I didn't fiddle around with it to fix it. The other option is installing an extension that simply deletes cookies when you close a tab.
I confirm. I never used containers before, and when I tried, I discovered it wouldn't work with how I configured firefox, which is always ON private mode.
I think the best way to do that is to keep the browser data directories completely separate by using the --user-data-dir option in chrome (--profile in firefox)
FF also has multiple profiles feature. But nothing matches Containers. Containers are different. Containers keep only the identity data (sesssion, cookies etc.) separate. All other data is shared. Profiles are painful. History, Password Manager, Bookmarks all are accessible and shared across FF containers. This makes it really useful.
You can't mix tabs from multiple profiles in the same window, though. And they don't share extensions etc. They're much heavier weight than containers.
I don't think you can use them to automatically sequester urls to certain profiles though? That's a serious limitation for my use - eg. I always want gmail to open in my logged-in 'engoogled' container, and never want plain google searches to be logged in. I don't want to manually enforce those rules (that's what computers are for).
Good point, but one of the key aspects about Firefox's implementation is that you can have different container tabs within the same window. As far as I know, that's still not possible with Chrome.
There are people who swear by Chrome’s profiles, then there are people who swear by Firefox’s containers. I’m in the former category. I’ve learned through various debates that as always, you’re not gonna convince anyone on the other side.
It doesn't protect from fingerprinting your machine using WebGL (whose main purpose is to extract data about video card), canvas (main purpose of canvas is to check what fonts you have and how they are rendered), screen size, OS and IP address and TTL of IP packets.
Then you carelessly enter your non-temporary email address or phone number to get an order from a shop and the shop links your fingerprint to your offline identifiers. Now you cannot escape from tracking anymore.
Fingerprinting is real. For example, a site of government services for Moscow has fingerprinting code and users log into it with their real name.
You can use containers or private mode but your fingerprint stays the same and uniquely identifies you. Disable WebGL, canvas, accessing non-default fonts from browser, reading OS name and screen size right now and vote for disabling it by default if you don't want to be tracked.
"Google wants to drop support for blocking WebRequests, which will cripple certain extensions, others might not even work at all. Mozilla is not going to follow this destructive path."
I switched back to Firefox (after using Chrome for a long time) back when Quantum launched and have stuck with it since. Initially I fell back to Chrome every now and then for the devtools, but I haven't felt the need to do that for a good while now. Works really well for my use cases at least.
I’ve said this in many other similar threads and I’ll say it here again. Google services suck in Firefox. And that’s why I first went back to chrome after switching to Firefox. And then it clicked, chrome is just an app for google services for me. Want to use google maps? Chrome. Want to browse the web? Firefox. Chrome is literally a google app now. I love using Firefox for everything and I’ve mentally transitioned to using it completely (sans google services).
It’s a great mental exercise and I love the fact that I’ve been able to abandon chrome this way. I feel happy using Firefox now. And all the data google has on me now is so biased because they only get my usage for their own services.
What features of google maps aren't working in Firefox? I use maps constantly and never have an issue. In fact I use the whole suite of Google apps daily (mail, calendar, YouTube, maps, photos, keep, drive, office suite, etc) without issue.
The only drawback I have with FF nowadays is history management.
I have enabled 'infinite history' (do not delete old history, ever) so I can keep a journal of what I've visited when. The history, as large as it might turn out, is just a few MB of an sqlite3 database (places.sql) -- problematic is the management of it using the Firefox UI. Searching is laggy and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes the history manager UI hang for many minutes or even hours (=essentially I always kill Firefox when I do this by mistake). I suspect the GUI constructs a view of the sqlite db using single GUI objects tied to single DB entries and therefore has maximum overhead.
Editing the places.sql file directly via the sqlite3 CLI (with Firefox shut down) is a matter of (milli)seconds at best.
If I had the resources to compile FF in reasonable time I would give developing the patch a shot myself, but browser development is not an option with my current hardware, and I do not have a build server set up.
PS. The fact that Chrome does not support tagged bookmarks is another nail for its coffin. Makes it impossible to organize 10000s of bookmarks, and search on them.
That's the main reason I've always stuck with Firefox. I use the address bar as a way to quickly access my history instead of using bookmarks, and it has worked so well for me so far.
Actually it only gives a limited numer (10 or so) hits from your history. I remember years ago, this wasn't the case and you could keyword search your history/bookmarks and the dropdown would get longer and get a scrollbar, but you could actually scroll through 100s of hits that way.
I used that a LOT, and I'm still sad they removed it for some reason. 10 is very often not enough, because it lists too many similar domains.
> "and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes the history manager UI hang for many minutes or even hours (=essentially I always kill Firefox when I do this by mistake). I suspect the GUI constructs a view of the sqlite db using single GUI objects tied to single DB entries and therefore has maximum overhead."
I've not probed this deeply, but I have encountered it and can confirm it's a problem. To give an idea of the magnitude of the problem, deleting 10,000 history items can easily lock up Firefox for a full hour. I think but haven't confirmed that it might even be nonlinear. e.g. deleting 1,000 entries 10 times in a row seems faster than deleting 10,000 entries in one go.
I don't know what firefox is doing here, but it's badly broken.
so i did a little bit of digging into it and it looks like it does a delete command for each of the items that are selected in the list separately. this is all overly simplified as there are other things going on (selecting the nodes to be deleted as well as notifications to other subsystems.)
That item can be a node(website) that has thousands of visits associated with it so it needs to then delete each of those in multiple batches of delete statements chunked by the db variable limit(~100 or 1000 I think).
Then after that transaction sqlite rebuilds the indexes(17 by my count) on the database with those items missing.
then it does the next chunk and continues on in chunks until there are no more items to delete and then the next item that was selected begins the process again. there might also be a problem with redrawing the history list taking time away from the deletion itself too. it's tough to say exactly what the full bottleneck it but the chunking of the deletes like that looks like a culprit.
Firefox is deleting each entry individually. I tried to contribute a patch with a short-circuit when you select all and hit delete, but the places code was in the middle of a refactoring, and as always with browsers it was way more complicated than my patch, so it wasn't accepted.
I also had the same desire as you to keep my firefox history for as long as possible. It's especially great for auto-completion of previously visited websites.
My places.sqlite file is several years old and has moved across several machines, it is 47MB.
I can't say I've experienced the same lag you're describing. At least using the firefox url bar ( where auto-completions show up ) I found it to be pretty quick. The firefox history management window "feels" a little old ( read: 90s ), but is functional for the times I've had to search for a site I visited 5 years ago and vaguely remembered the name.
What specific features would you want to see from firefox's history management window.
Make a copy of your profile (to preserve your history) then in Firefox's Show All History window, search for a site that has thousands of visits, select them all, then press delete. Firefox will start burning a few CPU cores and lock up for a long time, every time.
to see if that helps speed things up a bit. might not but it's free and safe(well as safe as anything can be i guess).
to your other point if you want to check this out you can likely use an artifact build to compile firefox in under a min or so if the changes are only in the javascript frontend code and not the backend c++ code. (unsure where the slowdown is)
It's true. I have kept giving Firefox another chance over time but haven't been convinced.
Recently, I tried Firefox again on Windows. And the experience is amazing indeed - faster, smoother, and with trackers blocking, very pleasant. And with strict protection, that's sort-of a builtin ad blocker.
Something still feels off on MacOS even though the last version has been a massive improvement for MBP Retina.
I keep trying Firefox but Google services are absolutely terrible on it, and I spend a lot of time in Gmail/Drive/Docs/Hangouts so having two sets of browsers like another commenter here said is a non-starter for me (I've tried it).
Firefox really should take care of it's native interface, it feels like a cross-platform app, and while it does have some worthy features to consider, for me it's too non-mac (and in that aspect, it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either) for someone using Safari to migrate.
> it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either)
I guess this is a subjective matter because to my eye, it looks fantastic on Windows, matching the Windows 10 dark theme very well. The active tab highlight looks like the open app highlights in my top-docked Windows taskbar. And the Firefox Container color-bars look great below that. Its sharp edges are a match for the sharp look of Windows.
To me, Chrome is the browser that doesn't look right on Windows. Its over-use of curved lines looks anachronistic, as if it's from the 2000s.
On the Mac, at least, it's painfully obvious that nothing matches. The look is a little off, but the behavior is way off. The scrolling doesn't work the same as native scrolling, nor do the context menus, the toolbars, the tabs, or the keyboard shortcuts. You can't do anything in Firefox without being reminded that you're using an app which is not like any other app on your Mac.
It seems they've been struggling to get more Mac developers for a long time. Unfortunately, their toolchain is so foreign to Mac developers, too, that people don't want to learn it. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
Well, they are to an extent with their work on the new Firefox Preview for Android, which is using underlying browser tech as a library instead of bundled together into a monolithic app, which improves code reuse for Focus and Firefox for Android. I don't know if this will translate at all for making separate UX on different platforms, but the optimist in me thinks it will.
That being said, I like the Firefox UI on Linux, Windows, and Android, so I guess I don't understand the desire for making it "more native". My excitement for the new Firefox for Android is all about the performance improvements, not the UI design.
I have always been a heavy user of Firefox, even in the pre-Quantum days.
My main reason was that Chrome would sync my bookmarks out of order and I am a heavy bookmarks sync user.
I gave Chrome multiple tries for bookmark syncing and yet they would sync them out of order (can't believe I am the only heavy bookmark user on Chrome who cares) so I just stuck with FF.
Then the privacy concerns happened and I stopped trying Chrome. Then Quantum happened and now FF is the lighter, faster browser. I had no real reason to use Chrome except browser compatibility and a few dev tools.
Then ublock origins is getting blocked and now I am recommending people to switch to Firefox.
I do like the seamless and easy to use multiple profiles that Chrome has. Makes it very nice to isolate your tasks. If I am not logged into reddit or HN I waste less time and less cognitive overhead. FF technically has them but I hate how I have to open a prelaunch dialog to use them.
Another heavy bookmarks user / hoarder here. I have around 30k bookmarks, so much bookmarks that Firefox freezes for a few seconds when I click on bookmarks menu bar item, because it tries to load them all within that drop down menu. I keep bookmarks sidebar permanently open without any slowdowns.
I've been using Firefox from its very beginnings so I can tell you I've tried switching to Chrome and Safari a few times over the years. Every time I tried to import bookmarks to other browsers they would simply crap out, while Firefox handled them without breaking a sweat.
Of course I continue to use FF for many other reasons but, at least at first, good and fast bookmarks management kept me using Firefox.
Lastly, if anyone knows a way to prevent Firefox to show all bookmarks in drop-down menu, let me know :)
Loading "about:profiles" lets you use profiles without the prelaunch dialog. It's not amazing UI; it's there basically to support debugging scenarios, but it does work.
I've been happy with everything about Firefox (on Xubuntu) from many years now. But when they released Quantum, the thing that bothered me a bit was not any feature or performance, but them removing curvy tabs for rectangular ones. Rather shallow of me, but we all have our UI quirks :). Luckily, Firefox UI is very customizable and somebody had already put in the effort [1] to provide curvy tabs. Just had to download it, change the RGB() values therein, and got back my preferred green curvy tabs. Just a silly thing, but might give somebody one more reason to switch to Firefox.
Not silly at all. I tried getting back into Firefox on macOS after Quantum but it still didn’t sit well with me. I just felt slightly out of place. Fast forward to last week and I happened to try it again and it looked real nice! The UI seemed smoother and less jarring than before. Plus the icon was new and slick. Not sure when those changes landed but just the look and feel give me more confidence in its solidness.
Similar thing with me except I stuck up with them even with Quantum until that fiasco with SSL certs happened and all extensions came to a halt. I'll never be able to trust a browser which does such a thing to its users.
Readit News
Like tabs so many years ago, it's the kind of feature that seems obvious in retrospect. I can't think of a hard technical reason why we couldn't have had container tabs a long time ago. I hope mobile and desktop OSes will one day implement the same feature for apps/programs.
Whoever was involved in coming up with the idea and with implementing it, thank you!
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
Beyond that - for container users I recently started using "Temporary Containers" [0] and it's an awesome use case for disposable containers where no browser interaction is associated. It's a fantastic use of containers.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
It seems like containers are a powerful concept with multiple different uses, but the UX for each of those uses would need to be different and at the moment it’s not optimised for any of them. Maybe there are extensions that can fix this for specific use cases but when I looked it seemed hard to work out which ones I’d want.
You describe exactly what I would want and expect.
Nevertheless once you've got used to it, it becomes an essential feature. Another reason to be thankful for Firefox's existence.
[1]:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117222
Also, I really wish you would be able to specify which container you want in the Home button when using multiple urls for your default tabs.
So this:
Would become something like this:Here is the github issue that tracks container support on Firefox Preview: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1481
It seems like a great feature. It's definitely a differentiator. Perhaps I had too specific of an approach going in. In general, for me tabs in a window are all related so flipping windows or closing windows are the context I switch between.
Ideally, I'd love to have Firefox handle the whole proxying or even networking part. Like have each Firefox profile use different network gateway (useful when you want to route all network traffic trough VPN for example).
It claims to allow you to set proxy settings per container.
Then you carelessly enter your non-temporary email address or phone number to get an order from a shop and the shop links your fingerprint to your offline identifiers. Now you cannot escape from tracking anymore.
Fingerprinting is real. For example, a site of government services for Moscow has fingerprinting code and users log into it with their real name.
You can use containers or private mode but your fingerprint stays the same and uniquely identifies you. Disable WebGL, canvas, accessing non-default fonts from browser, reading OS name and screen size right now and vote for disabling it by default if you don't want to be tracked.
I imagine that would boost Firefox growth.
Edit: Answering my own question...yup, it's in canary as of November 1st. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/google-begins...
https://gist.github.com/Lusito/dd6b76b93f83267903619103745cc...
"Google wants to drop support for blocking WebRequests, which will cripple certain extensions, others might not even work at all. Mozilla is not going to follow this destructive path."
Make sure proper ad blocking only works in firefox and make google choke on their evil policies masked with performance concerns.
And: https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1134127701583904770?s=20
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
I may have to rush an extension...
It’s a great mental exercise and I love the fact that I’ve been able to abandon chrome this way. I feel happy using Firefox now. And all the data google has on me now is so biased because they only get my usage for their own services.
Also not a RAM hog.
I have enabled 'infinite history' (do not delete old history, ever) so I can keep a journal of what I've visited when. The history, as large as it might turn out, is just a few MB of an sqlite3 database (places.sql) -- problematic is the management of it using the Firefox UI. Searching is laggy and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes the history manager UI hang for many minutes or even hours (=essentially I always kill Firefox when I do this by mistake). I suspect the GUI constructs a view of the sqlite db using single GUI objects tied to single DB entries and therefore has maximum overhead.
Editing the places.sql file directly via the sqlite3 CLI (with Firefox shut down) is a matter of (milli)seconds at best.
If I had the resources to compile FF in reasonable time I would give developing the patch a shot myself, but browser development is not an option with my current hardware, and I do not have a build server set up.
PS. The fact that Chrome does not support tagged bookmarks is another nail for its coffin. Makes it impossible to organize 10000s of bookmarks, and search on them.
I used that a LOT, and I'm still sad they removed it for some reason. 10 is very often not enough, because it lists too many similar domains.
I've not probed this deeply, but I have encountered it and can confirm it's a problem. To give an idea of the magnitude of the problem, deleting 10,000 history items can easily lock up Firefox for a full hour. I think but haven't confirmed that it might even be nonlinear. e.g. deleting 1,000 entries 10 times in a row seems faster than deleting 10,000 entries in one go.
I don't know what firefox is doing here, but it's badly broken.
(My places.sqlite is 55MB)
That item can be a node(website) that has thousands of visits associated with it so it needs to then delete each of those in multiple batches of delete statements chunked by the db variable limit(~100 or 1000 I think).
Then after that transaction sqlite rebuilds the indexes(17 by my count) on the database with those items missing.
then it does the next chunk and continues on in chunks until there are no more items to delete and then the next item that was selected begins the process again. there might also be a problem with redrawing the history list taking time away from the deletion itself too. it's tough to say exactly what the full bottleneck it but the chunking of the deletes like that looks like a culprit.
My places.sqlite file is several years old and has moved across several machines, it is 47MB.
I can't say I've experienced the same lag you're describing. At least using the firefox url bar ( where auto-completions show up ) I found it to be pretty quick. The firefox history management window "feels" a little old ( read: 90s ), but is functional for the times I've had to search for a site I visited 5 years ago and vaguely remembered the name.
What specific features would you want to see from firefox's history management window.
sqlite3 places.sqlite vacuum
to see if that helps speed things up a bit. might not but it's free and safe(well as safe as anything can be i guess).
to your other point if you want to check this out you can likely use an artifact build to compile firefox in under a min or so if the changes are only in the javascript frontend code and not the backend c++ code. (unsure where the slowdown is)
Recently, I tried Firefox again on Windows. And the experience is amazing indeed - faster, smoother, and with trackers blocking, very pleasant. And with strict protection, that's sort-of a builtin ad blocker.
Something still feels off on MacOS even though the last version has been a massive improvement for MBP Retina.
What feels off for you?
A) (if possible) migrate away from the services you mentioned.
B) lock-in deeper and deeper with the biggest advertising company on the planet.
That said, the mobile version seems really robust.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/03/a-glitch-is-breaking-all-f...
Firefox really should take care of it's native interface, it feels like a cross-platform app, and while it does have some worthy features to consider, for me it's too non-mac (and in that aspect, it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either) for someone using Safari to migrate.
I guess this is a subjective matter because to my eye, it looks fantastic on Windows, matching the Windows 10 dark theme very well. The active tab highlight looks like the open app highlights in my top-docked Windows taskbar. And the Firefox Container color-bars look great below that. Its sharp edges are a match for the sharp look of Windows.
To me, Chrome is the browser that doesn't look right on Windows. Its over-use of curved lines looks anachronistic, as if it's from the 2000s.
It seems they've been struggling to get more Mac developers for a long time. Unfortunately, their toolchain is so foreign to Mac developers, too, that people don't want to learn it. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
That being said, I like the Firefox UI on Linux, Windows, and Android, so I guess I don't understand the desire for making it "more native". My excitement for the new Firefox for Android is all about the performance improvements, not the UI design.
My main reason was that Chrome would sync my bookmarks out of order and I am a heavy bookmarks sync user.
I gave Chrome multiple tries for bookmark syncing and yet they would sync them out of order (can't believe I am the only heavy bookmark user on Chrome who cares) so I just stuck with FF.
Then the privacy concerns happened and I stopped trying Chrome. Then Quantum happened and now FF is the lighter, faster browser. I had no real reason to use Chrome except browser compatibility and a few dev tools.
Then ublock origins is getting blocked and now I am recommending people to switch to Firefox.
I do like the seamless and easy to use multiple profiles that Chrome has. Makes it very nice to isolate your tasks. If I am not logged into reddit or HN I waste less time and less cognitive overhead. FF technically has them but I hate how I have to open a prelaunch dialog to use them.
I've been using Firefox from its very beginnings so I can tell you I've tried switching to Chrome and Safari a few times over the years. Every time I tried to import bookmarks to other browsers they would simply crap out, while Firefox handled them without breaking a sweat.
Of course I continue to use FF for many other reasons but, at least at first, good and fast bookmarks management kept me using Firefox.
Lastly, if anyone knows a way to prevent Firefox to show all bookmarks in drop-down menu, let me know :)
[1]: https://github.com/wilfredwee/photon-australis