Gregory's ServerIf you're switching to Firefox this week, I collected a list of the team's favourite hidden features back when I worked there:
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2020/10/25/navigational-instruments/
 94 comments
 @mhoye The big, and main one I use is "First Party Isolation" brought over from the Tor project. Basically if you visit a website, it's cookies (and third-party cookies from it) are isolated from others. So if blah.com has a facebook tracking pixel, the cookie that pixel sets is different to the one from the facebook pixel set by foo.com, and different from the facebook pixel set by facebook.com. No more being tracked across the internet! @stilescrisis @anaerin The reason Chrome is doing this nonsense now is specifically so they don't lose any real visibility into what people are doing on the web when they need to turn that on in a year. @mhoye Firefox has been my primary browser since 0.7 or so and the alt-select and shift-rightclick are both news to me. Ctrl+Enter worked in IE at least as far back as 2000.   @mhoye I work for an association and we use Aptify as our Association Management System. I've recently figured out that it runs much better in FireFox than in Chrome (especially when printing Crystal Reports) and have been telling everyone in my association about it.  @bytebro @mhoye The browser itself supports crypto, replaces ads (a security risk), and at one point injected affiliate links. For a browser focusing on privacy, the latter two are massive red flags. Here's a full article giving the rundown: https://www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser @randomwolfguy @bytebro @mhoye also the guy behind it invented (shudder) JavaScript, in case those other facts don't scare you enough @capn_b @randomwolfguy @mhoye Hah! I'm aware of the feelings of many about the person behind Brave, of course. I've naturally disabled all the telemetry, 'news' and crypto nonsense in Brave. It's still one of the few browsers to rid me of all the advertising cruft on YouTube, for example, out of the box. I tried FF for about a full week, and it's still not for me, at least not yet. Very slow in comparison to Brave, and some of its rendering decisions are just perverse, in my view. Oh, and as my home machine is running Garuda I also tried their version of FF ('DragonFire' or something), but that seems to be just a pretty skin over FF. @bytebro @randomwolfguy @mhoye hotswapping ads is such a violation of your trust though. I just couldn't. @bytebro @randomwolfguy @mhoye that doesn't make me more inclined to trust it, given that many of the concerns about the browser are about what's going on behind the scenes @alexhammy Still Chromium-based, I believe. I actually used to have a paid sub on Opera back before I said good-bye to Windows on my laptop at home, about 12yrs ago. Wasn't bad then. Then discovered various flavours of Linux, and used Chrome until "Do no evil" became a joke at Google.  @alexhammy Indeed. The long-term mission is to migrate away from Chromium-based just because Google basically controls it, FOSS licenses notwithstanding. Currently Brave works for me and has yet to crap the bed on any of my systems. @alexhammy @bytebro "Opera is so cool they have good ad tracking"  @asbestos @randomwolfguy @mhoye Of course. You can not like it for any reason or none at all. I've just failed to find a better one so far, that works how I want. This too will change, perhaps if Mozilla get better at FF, or another non-Chromium contender comes along.  @randomwolfguy I had high hopes for Brave and spent a week using it before learning of the founder’s weird predilections. The tech was decent, but there’s plenty of decent tech choices nowadays  @randomwolfguy @bytebro @mhoye I seem to recall installing Brave at one point, and it set itself up to load upon startup. @nantucketebooks @randomwolfguy @mhoye Not for me. If I want that I have to add it to start-up apps. This is on Garuda Linux. @mhoye “Holding down Alt while selecting text allows you to select text within a link without triggering the link” Aha, good one   @mhoye this seems ... I don't know.... isn't the point to get away from Google? (Image shows google search and looks like the same weird spammy stuff I get on Edge.)  @mhoye I'm reading and this is already gamechanging: > Start typing your search with ^ to show only matches in your browsing history.  @mhoye Neat. I’m likely switching due to the changes Google is making that will effect ad blockers. @mhoye This is super helpful, thank you! I've been a Firefox user continuously since it first came out and a lot of this is new to me.  @mhoye great tips, too bad Firefox has a bug (unfixed for at least a decade) where on Mac with Czech keyboard layout, cmd-1 zooms in instead of switching to first tab. Others work as expected. I have first reported this in like 2012, and couple of times since, to no avail.   @mhoye This is nice, but is there a handy symbol for 'this is an URL, I don't want to consult a search engine, thank you very much'? no about:config ? there was some other fun stuff back in the nscp days, I miss the developer about: urls (but they carried us over into about:credits, fwiw) good times @mhoye "Hitting Ctrl-enter in the URL bar works like autocomplete;”mozilla” go straight to www.mozilla.com, for example. Shift-enter will open a URL in a new tab."  @mhoye I switched ages ago but I flip back and forth between that and ddg because I'm starting to get wary of putting all my eggs in one basket.  @mhoye This is great! Thanks so much! I have been using FF for several years and didn't know about most of the small navigation tricks. I'm a big fan of named profiles. I have one for each community I'm part of, so things are tidy - well, at least not mixed.  Shift-right click is going to make my life so much better. No more screaming obscenities at Google trying to screenshot a Google Doc or Sheet. Not that screaming obscenities at Google isn't fun sometimes... @mhoye I'd like to add that if you use DuckDuckGo as your default Firefox search provider you can extremely quickly search other search engines from the Quantumbar/omnibar/omnibox using bang commands. I use this feature constantly to search directly on sites like YouTube (!yt), AlternativeTo (!alt), and Amazon (!a). Other search engines may also have this feature. @mish @mhoye I find #Duckduckgo bangs so useful. If I want to search the electronics distributor #Digikey, I just add !digikey. There are many bangs.  Kind of you.  @HistoPol @mish @mhoye I mostly use it when I know which site I'm going to anyway (so there is no practical loss of privacy). I also automatically delete cookies, use uBO on strict mode, still use uMatrix, enabled RFP, and do all of this through a VPN anyway. Not saying it's foolproof, but loads better than doing nothing at all. @mish @mhoye full list here: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs @mhoye @cpm @artisanrox I don't particularly think much was lost there, really - the first mover there wasn't really "the address bar" or "the search bar", it was corporate firewalls. @mhoye but to book mark all open tabs, you need two steps be nice if FF worked on stuff that 99% of users need @basyl There's a bunch of different places (containers, zoom levels, etc) that do part of the job but Firefox has never had per-site-config coalesce into a coherent story. It remains a missed opportunity, IMO. The question of "if users have a choice in how they view and change your site, what do they do" is a user-feedback / UX research goldmine that nobody has really explored. @mhoye I know a lot of these are relatively recent but I've been using firefox (and firebird, and phoenix, and m/b) for fully 21 years this month and didn't know about most of this @chriscunningham when I compiled the list we found people who had been working on the Firefox codebase for years who didn’t know some of them. @mhoye There're a lot of good tips in there, thanks. I've been using multiple profiles for years: my normal one, and a 'trusted' profile I only use for sites I know I can trust -- banking and whatnot, mostly -- that has all the ad defences disabled in case they break things. I've failed entirely at setting up a self-hosted sync server, though. Can't get that running no matter what. Wut? You're not at Mozilla any more? That's either a recent development or it's been a lot longer than I thought since you presented "State of the Browser" at @gtalug    I was using Firefox when it was Netscape Navigator (yes, I know it's not the same browser but Firefox is a clear descendant of the original NN). I never forgave Gates for bundling his POS IE with Windows. Netscape Navigator was a thing of beauty. |
@mhoye Hey, this is really nice! Thank you!