From Amber Neeley at AppleInsider.
Yes yes yes! We need to save Firefox which I still find the best and most customizeable browser. And Apple, Google and Microsoft all push their in house browsers over it, which has decimated it’s market share.
ArsTechnica has the report on this. As if I didn’t hate Google and it’s behavior, but this is just gross. Google already started by messing with ad blocker users with YouTube, but to basically emaciate ad blockers in Google Chrome is disgusting behavior, especially as the dominant web browser in the world.
If we had a working government I would say they should do something about this, but they are so bad when it comes to understanding tech at all that they would never do anything in time or correctly.
Google’s Manifest V3 is utter garbage and won’t do any of the things they claim with privacy benefits, it is literally only to help their bottom line by stopping ad blockers.
One can only hope that this will push more people back to the vastly superior Firefox, but since they already switched to Google’s Manifest V2, and are also supposed to support Manifest V3, which means they should never have switched to Web Extensions, but at least they claim they will continue to support webrequests in MV3.
Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest. We will continue to work with content blockers and other key consumers of this API to identify current and future alternatives where appropriate. Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we are committed to ensuring that Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.
Manifest v3 in Firefox: Recap & Next Steps
I love this as I still use Firefox. I don’t trust Google and Chrome, and while I use Safari on iOS on my mac I like the customization of Firefox, and even if it isn’t quite as fast as Chrome.
And yes of course I still use Firefox, and you should do. It is independent of Google and it’s Chrome browser that you know monitors everything you do for Google, and it’s Blink engine is just used everywhere. Their is also Apple’s Safari which uses WebKit and I am forced to use that my iPhone and iPad, but on my desktop I prefer the customization of Firefox and Mozilla’s Gecko engine.
And Mozilla needs the support, it’s market share keeps going down in favor of Chrome, and we need the competition. If there is no competition why would google put the money it does into Chrome, so go check out Mozilla’s Firefox, it is a great browser!
I will sometime do a post about my favorite extensions, like Tree Style Tab which I find so much more convenient than top loading tabs.
OK so I know this is probably going into the weeds way too much for most readers (if there even is anyone currently reading my blog), but this has been an annoyance to me for some time.
I use Mozilla Firefox as my primary browser and have for a good many years. Now I use Safari on iOS because all browsers on iOS are using the same Safari engine anyway, so might as well use Apples. And I do use Safari once in a while on my mac, especially to manage my bookmarks which manage to get pretty messed up at least once a month so I need to go back to my most recent backup of Firefox bookmarks and replace them to clean them up, but for general browsing I use Firefox.
Now I recently took a jump into trying out using Vivaldi browser, because it has built in ability to have my tabs on the left or right, but I don’t like them as well as Firefox’s plug in Tree Style Tabs, plus I find Vivaldi to be a bit of a resource hog when I have a lot of tabs open and I often have way too many tabs open. Don’t get me wrong it is a good browser, but I have always preferred Firefox even if it supposedly more of a resource hog than either Chrome or Safari. I have always liked it plug ins better, and it just the most customizable especially if you delve into the about:config settings and even more so if you delve into CSS by customizing your userChrome.css file (which is a text file you put into your profile folder within a chrome folder.
Because I use Tree Style tabs on the left of my browser, I have wanted to get rid of the tabs along the top and with some coding help I managed that.
I added the following to my userChrome.css file and this hides the top tabs, which saves a little space at the top of my browser.
/* hides the native tabs */
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse;
}Now I wanted to make the damn white title bar at the top be dark. I know it was possible to get rid of it (and it is gone on Windows already), but I like having the site title at the top.
Now to get some help I posted my question in the Reddit Firefox CSS section and got the answers very quickly.
So again I entered about:config in the url bar of Firefox to go into the advanced settings.
And first set browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar to true, and it was set to false which allows the OS to draw the title bar, when set to true Firefox draws the title bar so the color can be changed using a #titelbar tag in the css. When I set this the title bar went away, but I was able to turn it back on in the customizetoolbar settings. To get there right click in the toolbar and select customize toolbar,
Then in the bottom right hand corner there is a checkbox for the title and I turned it back on, though it was still bright.
Next again in about:config, I set the setting for widget.macos.respect-system-appearance to true, which made the title bar follow the settings for dark mode, and now my title bar is dark. WOOHOO!
No more top tabs and the title bar is dark, I couldn’t be happier!
Now I am running the new Safari within Big Sur in the Safari Technology Preview, and I am on an iMac Pro with a second 27″ monitor, so 2 27″ monitors running at 2560×1440. To me the new safari is only trying to save space, but doing it at the cost of usability.
The tabs in Monterey become illegible and hard to find too quickly and all so the tab bar can take up less space. All well and good for a small screened laptops users, but useless for large displays! And even more useless for power users who have lots of plug ins which also take up space!
And you can’t even activate the old functionality in Safari, only the new tabs are available.
And this is Firefox with Tree Style tabs. They are always legible and you can have so many of them. Once again, maybe not so good for a small laptop, but for a big monitor it is essential. If only firefox would have a true dark mode and allow me to get rid of the light title bar at the top, but at least it means you can read the web site title. Still I wish I could turn the top tabs off and just have tree style tabs.
Of course there is also Vivaldi, which has tree style tabs built in. It is a gorgeous and fast browser, built on chrome, while I would prefer Firefox for it being a different engine and the most customizable browser.
And that isn’t even the worst of it. If you have Safari at default settings, when you switch tabs you get the tabs changing color based on the web site. For some web sites, it isn’t so bad, but for others…
Luckily you can turn this off in advanced tabs.
Just make sure to check Never Use Background Color in Toolbar.
If you have been reading my blog you will know that I moved Firefox to MultiProcessor E10s support, and because of that I gave up on Xmarks, since it doesn’t support E10s.
I have had years of issue with Xmarks Sync, which constantly messed up my Bookmarks especially between Firefox and Safari. The fact that iCloud Sync doesn’t have a reset or the ability to easily erase your online bookmarks and clean them up.
So I decided to try using the iCloud Bookmarks sync plug in which works on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome on windows on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and then use Firefox and Chrome Sync. And it seemed to work for a while.
But as of today I looked at my bookmarks and they were completely messed up yet again.
Now I constantly keep backups of my Firefox bookmarks on my Mac, because of all the issues I have had. So I was able to restore my Firefox bookmarks, so I can restore them.
The problem is that I have to run my Surface to get my bookmarks to sync, and we will see how it goes from the Firefox backup. Or maybe I will see how my Parallels works with the sync.
I will update to let you know how it goes.
EDIT:
HA! Thought I might be able to fix my bookmarks easily, but after re-importing my Firefox bookmarks, my bookmarks are messed up all over all browsers and all operating systems.
EDIT 2:
I just imported my bookmarks into Firefox in Parallels and we will see how the sync goes now.
EDIT 3:
Ha! I was kidding myself. My bookmarks in Safari were so messed up it was a joke! I exported them as an HTML from Firefox, cleared my Safari ones and imported them again.
EDIT 4:
Even better! After replacing my safari bookmarks with clean imported bookmarks I walked away for a few minutes and when I came back the bookmarks were all gone! So I had to import them again, and see what happens.
EDIT 5:
AND IT DID IT AGAIN! What the hell!
So after giving up on LastPass because it is not e10 multiprocessor compatible, I have been trying to sync my bookmarks using Firefox Sync, Chrome Sync and iCloud Bookmark Sync for windows. Unfortunately iCloud bookmarks is garbage, because it has no simple way to either clear bookmarks, or force a sync from a single source, and unfortunately it often gets completely corrupted! To clear it you have to disable sync everywhere except your mac, and let it sit, then clear your bookmarks and either import or create a new clean set. Unforunately this process is very unstable. It requires much switching off sync and waiting, and hoping.
Keep your fingers crossed, as I am.
So I was let know that LastPass version 4 does in fact work with e10 multiprocessing in Firefox. The normal update does not work, so you need to install LastPass 4.0 from the web site.
There is no word on Xmarks though.
So I am now running the iCloud Bookmarks Plug In on my Surface Pro 4 to sync between Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. And using Firefox bookmark Sync to sync from my mac to my Surface Pro.
So it looks like neither Xmarks or Lastpass will ever support e10 Multiprocessing in Mozilla Firefox. For years Mozilla Firefox has been my browser of choice because of all of it’s extensions. There was a short period where I used Chrome, but it is not as customizable. Firefox though is changing and is becoming multiprocessor, and that requires re-writing plugins to work with e10, or they won’t work. Right no Firefox will still work without e-10, by keeping Firefox in the old mode without mulit-processor support.
I contacted Xmarks/Lastpass support to see about their e-10 support, and I got this response.
Hello,
Thanks for reaching out to Xmarks Support.
Through testing that we were unable to install Xmarks in Electrolysis e10. At this time, we have no plans to launch Xmarks compatibility with e10. I will submit a formal feature request ticket advocating your desire if you’d like.
Thanks,
Jeremy
So basically a paid service will never update their software and will very shortly lose all support for Firefox my favorite browser! Time to kill my accounts for xmarks and lastpass!
Of course now the question is how to replace these essential programs. I am going to try out Firefox Browser sync, and iCloud sync. Unfortunately iCloud Browser sync only runs on windows, but I have my Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10, so I can try Safari Browser sync to sync between Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac. And it is e10 supported, so that might work. I will keep my backup in Firefox on my mac so I can keep replacing my good backups.