A Browser for all Four Seasons
June 25, 2021 6:07 AM   Subscribe

You're Not Using the Web's Best Browser. It's about those damned tabs, my friend.
posted by storybored (127 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's good but still suffers from being built on Chromium / Blink (and, further down, WebKit). :( Everyone (but Firefox) collapsing down into one for-profit browser pit has really distorted the politics of the web.
posted by introp at 6:30 AM on June 25, 2021 [25 favorites]


Forgot to add how Vivaldi makes money.
posted by storybored at 6:37 AM on June 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


With endless new customization options like new email clients and a feed reader, Vivaldi 4.0 just got better.

Hmm.
posted by chavenet at 6:41 AM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Not using the best browser? Piffle!
posted by jim in austin at 6:48 AM on June 25, 2021 [19 favorites]


[grudgingly updates to xgopher 1.2]
posted by phooky at 6:49 AM on June 25, 2021 [19 favorites]


Everyone (but Firefox) collapsing down into one for-profit browser pit

Just because Chromium as the core of a browser is made by Google doesn't necessarily make it a "for-profit browser pit." It's open source. You can get the source code and do literally anything you want with it (functionality-wise) and compile your own browser. The for-profit sneakiness and nastiness come in with Chrome, where you can't see the code Google has added to their Chromium engine, and it's fairly clear that they do a lot of shady tracking stuff on the "closed source" side of things.

A common markup/interpreter codebase for the web is a good thing, both for developers and users.
posted by tclark at 6:50 AM on June 25, 2021 [15 favorites]


Yet, at Vivaldi, we don’t track or profile you. Nor do we collect usage data. In fact, we believe that the unnecessary collection of data is dangerous and has no place in your browser. We only try to have a general overview of how many users we have, what OS they run and where in the world they are, taken as a whole.

Pretty sure that's the definition of tracking.
posted by geoff. at 6:52 AM on June 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


A common markup/interpreter codebase for the web is a good thing, both for developers and users.

I have a nuanced set of opinions about that, as you might imagine. A common set of markup/interpreter standards for the web is a good thing - we have that, that's what the web is! - but competing implementations matter. A single common codebase just means the de-jure standards live and die at the whim of the primary upstream owner of that codebase.
posted by mhoye at 7:02 AM on June 25, 2021 [48 favorites]


mhoye says it much better (and with more experience) than I could.

Otherwise, legitimately: is there any reason I shouldn't just keep using Firefox and Thunderbird if I want a rock-solid internet experience, while at least feeling like I'm putting up a modicum of resistance to the tech giants of the world?
posted by Alex404 at 7:10 AM on June 25, 2021 [9 favorites]


...is there any reason I shouldn't just keep using Firefox and Thunderbird if I want a rock-solid internet experience, while at least feeling like I'm putting up a modicum of resistance to the tech giants of the world?

I'm rocking both and have no plan to switch anytime soon.

Also: Tabs below the urlbar!!!
posted by Thorzdad at 7:23 AM on June 25, 2021 [10 favorites]


is there any reason I shouldn't just keep using Firefox and Thunderbird

None whatsoever. Personally I still like Firefox better than Chromium, even with the Firefox dev team's apparent devotion to piecewise removal of every nice thing that's historically made it more pleasant to use*.

I do, however, keep Chromium around for the occasional inadequately tested site that just refuses to play nice with Firefox for whatever reason, the Chromium engine having now become the 21st Century's IE6.

Also: tabs wherever the hell I decide I like them.

*Still irked about the disappearance of the status bar.
posted by flabdablet at 7:27 AM on June 25, 2021 [17 favorites]


Also also, browsers that think my window title bars are the right place to stuff their own UI elements can kiss my fat arse.
posted by flabdablet at 7:32 AM on June 25, 2021 [8 favorites]


“ I don't think it's a stretch to say that Vivaldi is the Emacs of web browsers. “

But… but… the name… just no
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:33 AM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


Pretty sure that's the definition of tracking.

I don't think it is, but it depends on what happens to the data on the way.
posted by pompomtom at 7:38 AM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


> ...still suffers from being built on Chromium / Blink (and, further down, WebKit).

Blink was forked eight years ago. That's a lot of time for codebase to evolve -- and that was only the WebCore component because Google had used their own V8 Javascript engine rather than JavaScriptCore.

Otherwise, if ancestry determines monoculture, we have to have a talk about KHTML. And maybe Mosaic.
posted by at by at 7:39 AM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


a general overview of how many users we have, what OS they run and where in the world they are, taken as a whole. ... Pretty sure that's the definition of tracking.

Oh come on. On one hand we have "aggregate statistics about our millions of users". On the other hand we have "we know Facebook user Nelson Minar searched for biltong 5 minutes ago, along with searches for beef jerky recipes. He also searched for biltong a few weeks ago. And his friend Geoff also searched for biltong last week just three hours after they met at a cafe serving South African coffee and snacks. Let's show Nelson some ads for biltong on the websites where we control ad inventory."

Which would you prefer? They aren't even remotely similar.
posted by Nelson at 7:41 AM on June 25, 2021 [45 favorites]


BTW if you want the Emacs of Web Browsers why not use Emacs? Specifically Eww, the web browser written by Emacs wunder-hacker Lars Ingebrigtsen?

Vivaldi isn't for me. I would like one specific feature in Firefox though, to color tabs based on the overall color / theme of the website they're open for. There are a few tab coloring extensions for Firefox but they're mostly just random colors or task-specific. I want something automated that is still representative of the site.
posted by Nelson at 7:44 AM on June 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


So isn't there some precept that all software eventually becomes an email client? Is that still a thing?
posted by pompomtom at 7:54 AM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


I personally very much like having my email client and browser be different programs. Sometimes I only want one of them to be open, so Firefox + Thunderbird 4 life.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:58 AM on June 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


I used to care about that too, but Fastmail's web interface is good enough that the only thing I use Thunderbird for these days is making sporadic email backups over IMAP.
posted by flabdablet at 8:01 AM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


Remember when web browsers were useful tools? Remember when you could follow sites you liked, check your email, and see your calendar, all without leaving the browser?

I don't remember these days, and I've never had any interest in 'customizing' my web browser, beyond setting my home page and having it remember a few websites.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:02 AM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Still irked about the disappearance of the status bar.

I blame this on the widening of display aspect ratios. Display aspect ratios are at most 3/4 as tall as they used to be, and constantly getting wider, so vertical real estate is increasingly at a premium. I guess this is good for watching movies though.
posted by aubilenon at 8:03 AM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


I would like one specific feature in Firefox though, to color tabs based on the overall color / theme of the website they're open for. There are a few tab coloring extensions for Firefox but they're mostly just random colors or task-specific. I want something automated that is still representative of the site.

Are the site icons not appearing in your tabs? I know there's a setting for that, but damned if I can find it right now.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:08 AM on June 25, 2021


No love for Brave in here?
posted by Hutch at 8:09 AM on June 25, 2021 [7 favorites]


Killer title game there, storybored.
posted by kimberussell at 8:09 AM on June 25, 2021 [9 favorites]


>So isn't there some precept that all software eventually becomes an email client? Is that still a thing?
Yes, in Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopement -- with the follow-up that those that don't expand to read mail get replaced by programs that do.
posted by k3ninho at 8:16 AM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


So, funny story. Firefox's clipboard docs say:
Calls to the methods of the Clipboard object will not succeed if the user hasn't granted the needed permissions using the Permissions API and the "clipboard-read" or "clipboard-write" permission as appropriate.
and then, several paragraphs later, go on to say:
For example, Firefox does not yet support the "clipboard-read" and "clipboard-write" permissions, so access to the methods that access and change the contents of the clipboard are restricted in other ways.
That cost me a day.

The original RFC is from 2006, the last update was June 4th, 2021. Chrome has had support since about 2017.

Look, I get it. I understand the benefits of a diverse technical ecology, and how competition spurs innovation. I love the idea of a standards driven system. BUT. For crying out loud, the standards don't help if everyone has a different philosophy of how they're implemented, and when, and they take a decade and a half to come out.

Having a dominant single player tends to move the market past some of the gridlock that standards can cause, because they're not going to wait.
posted by SunSnork at 8:34 AM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


No love for Brave in here?

I gave both Brave and Vivaldi serious test drives and arrived at a very strong conclusion that Vivaldi was fantastic and Brave was extremely meh.

Just like the FPP says, it's all about the tabs. Tab tiling in particular, wow do I use the hell out of that, but stacking and pinning are also excellent.

I also customized my keyboard shortcuts in Vivaldi to give me similar behavior to the other things I rely on as a daily driver, Jupyterlab and a multi-tabbed terminal. Having ctrl-T open a new tab consistently across those three things is such a relief to my forced-to-context-switch-constantly brain.

I should also note, you can create a Vivaldi account for settings sync, so the hour or so I spent customizing things 2 years ago I never even think about any more, even when moving to a new machine. Just login and done.
posted by mcstayinskool at 8:35 AM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


The most excited I've been about tabs lately was when I watched the Safari section of WWDC recently. Holy hell I want all of that. And it looks like there's a preview available...hmm.

But yeah, extending the color / design of the page through the tab and menus, tab groups that can be closed and reopened, and a few more bells and whistles might FINALLY get me to swap off of Firefox and onto Safari.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:44 AM on June 25, 2021


I gave both Brave and Vivaldi serious test drives and arrived at a very strong conclusion that Vivaldi was fantastic and Brave was extremely meh.

Does that include the privacy issues that Brave purports to be focused on?
posted by The Bellman at 8:45 AM on June 25, 2021


Brave is, IMO, run by scumbags. I don't trust them.
posted by glonous keming at 8:46 AM on June 25, 2021 [30 favorites]


GIVE ME YOUR FUCKEN RAM
posted by adept256 at 8:48 AM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yes, it includes the privacy issues. All of that can be reasonably covered by 3rd party extensions (which I do).

And yes, Brave is run by Brendan Eich, who had to leave Mozilla Foundation because of donations to anti-LGBTQ causes.
posted by mcstayinskool at 8:49 AM on June 25, 2021 [12 favorites]


I had certainly heard that Brave is run by scumbags. Haven't checked it out too much.
posted by pompomtom at 8:50 AM on June 25, 2021


Tab tiling in particular, wow do I use the hell out of that, but stacking and pinning are also excellent.

That does look cool, but that's all stuff I get for free because I use a tiling windows manger (xmonad on arch btw). It's funny seeing more and more programs and OSes implement tiling features. It's like that time I was briefly fashionable in 2005.
posted by Alex404 at 8:50 AM on June 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


A sure sign that the browser company is actually selling you to its real end-users is that video autoplay is required and cannot be disabled.

Firefox now seems to disable autoplay by default. Both Edge and Chrome make it difficult to impossible to turn off.
posted by bonehead at 8:54 AM on June 25, 2021 [13 favorites]


I have been using Vivaldi for a long time, mostly because it's the only browser I've found with a solid implementation of vertical tabs. I do not understand why, in this world of 16:9 and ultrawide monitors, no other browser seems interested in putting tabs in a list down the side of the screen. It seems such an obvious solution to the "hundreds of open tabs" problem - but instead, Chrome now allows you to group and colour your single row of tiny little icons.
posted by Blorg at 8:55 AM on June 25, 2021 [8 favorites]


It's like that time I was briefly fashionable in 2005.

Oh please, you get all flushed but I was fashionable for the whole 2000's!

PSA: pompomtom is not now and has never been fashionable.
posted by pompomtom at 8:55 AM on June 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


No love for Brave in here?

Brendan Eich is a not very well-hidden MAGA-flavored Theocrat. As far as I know he's never disavowed or repudiated his foul beliefs and politics.
posted by tclark at 8:56 AM on June 25, 2021 [7 favorites]


I share appreciation for Firefox, but for my "work" browser I've been using Vivaldi since v1.x. The bookmark shortcuts and tab stacking are lifesavers for me. I try to minimize my dependency on extensions as there's been quite a few cases of extension ownership being shifted or captured for nefarious purposes.

That said, I don't have any particular plans to use the new baked-in applications - I've got my email and rss working just fine, thanks.
posted by microscone at 8:57 AM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


He's a COVID denier, too.

Don't go anywhere near Brave.
posted by tclark at 8:58 AM on June 25, 2021 [21 favorites]


Display aspect ratios are at most 3/4 as tall as they used to be, and constantly getting wider

This annoys me to distraction. As a digital photographer who shoots in both portrait and landscape modes, all the tall images being displayed significantly smaller than the wide ones while editing is maddening.

/derail
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:59 AM on June 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


Does Vivaldi support touch gestures? I didn't know about how terrible the head of Brave is; I've been sing Brave over Firefox because I can swipe back and forwards on my touch screen, and that function is suuuuuper janky in Firefox.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 9:07 AM on June 25, 2021


On desktop I always rock my primary screen in portrait mode (if not both when I have a dual monitor setup). Webpages and especially word processing are so much less claustrophobic! I’m amazed there don’t seem to be any iPad keyboard cases that position the screen vertically — it’s so much nicer that I would consider using that as a daily driver instead of a laptop.
posted by stopgap at 9:07 AM on June 25, 2021


Yes Brendan Eich seems to be a bad person with harmful personal beliefs. But also Brave is an unethical company with a variety of scandals that betray its true colors. The very premise of the business is to take ad revenue away from sites and then process it through Brave, who takes a cut and then gives some fraction of the original revenue to the site instead. Ad blocking is ethical. Ad removal is not. There's also a variety of scandals where Brave did something gross, got caught, then stopped doing the gross thing and promised to never do it again. Those stories betray their ethics.
posted by Nelson at 9:09 AM on June 25, 2021 [23 favorites]


No love for Brave in here?

None whatsoever. Even setting Eich himself aside, the entire point of his business was to sell itself as a privacy focused browser while quietly slurping up far more personal data than other browsers do, and stealing revenue from websites by replacing their ads with Brave’s own. Absolutely vile. I honestly can’t believe it’s still around.
posted by ook at 9:11 AM on June 25, 2021 [14 favorites]


Yes Brendan Eich seems to be a bad person with harmful personal beliefs. But also Brave is an unethical company with a variety of scandals that betray its true colors. The very premise of the business is to take ad revenue away from sites and then process it through Brave, who takes a cut and then gives some fraction of the original revenue to the site instead. Ad blocking is ethical. Ad removal is not. There's also a variety of scandals where Brave did something gross, got caught, then stopped doing the gross thing and promised to never do it again. Those stories betray their ethics.

I've had Brave installed as a backup in case I run into a site that doesn't like my primary browser or Opera. Thank you for providing this explanation of why I need to get it off my PC immediately. Will give Vivaldi a try.
posted by fuse theorem at 9:14 AM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


As someone who has written extensions for both Chrome and Firefox, I prefer Firefox by quite a bit. The entire experience is much, much smoother for publishing, for example. Plus, Chrome apparently refuses to offer true cookie/session store isolation between tabs, which is maddening.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 9:15 AM on June 25, 2021 [7 favorites]


Ad blocking is ethical. Ad removal is not.

Er, I meant "ad replacement is not ethical". My complaint is about a third party inserting themselves into the revenue stream. I also hate the way AdBlock accepts payments from Google, etc to show you their ads; it's an extortion racket.
posted by Nelson at 9:16 AM on June 25, 2021 [6 favorites]


OK, then, I guess Brave is out!
posted by The Bellman at 9:17 AM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


Is there a Chromium alternative to Brave that someone can recommend? Touch screen gestures such as swiping backwards and pinch zoom are part of my workflow, and loosing that is a real pain. I just tried Vivaldi and it doesn't appear to have those capabilities, nor does Firefox last I checked (there are plugins but they are very janky). It seems that only browsers built on Chromium can really handle that, and I'm not exactly jumping at the idea of going back to Expl-I mean Edge.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 9:23 AM on June 25, 2021


the Chromium engine having now become the 21st Century's IE6.

Only in being popular but Safari is the one battling for the "as bad as IE6 in its standards implementation" throne.
posted by simmering octagon at 9:30 AM on June 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


I liked the Vivaldi that was keeping the dream of Opera alive after Opera "sold out." I went to Firefox after the whole Opera shakeup because early Vivaldi was pretty rough. I guess I should check it out again, but I generally prefer the openess of Firefox even if it doesn't have tab stacking.

I miss the heyday of Opera, though. They really had a different vision of the Internet and it was one I would much rather have today over this hellscape of silos, surveillance capitalists, and narcissists. I remember when they were trying to bundle a tiny little webserver into the browser with the goal of making running and networking your own simple websites easy. It was so counter to what everyone else was doing at the time. Probably a security nightmare, sure, but can you imagine if they had been more successful? The Internet landscape would look a lot different if everyone was in control of their own self-hosted blog that also acted as a social network.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 9:32 AM on June 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


@Nelson I liked ChromaTabs (Plus), which coloured tabs using the average colour of the favicon, but it has long been defunct. I've been thinking of developing a new compatible extension by porting the ChromaTabs algorithm to a fork of TST-Colored-tabs.
posted by confluency at 9:35 AM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


Hmmmm... looks like Brave is going in the bin - not so much because Brendan Eich seems to be a 5 star scuzz bucket (I don't spend a lot of time online looking for saints and even less expecting them) and more due to the dodgy practices written into the Brave model helpfully identified here. Again, I am in your debt MetaFilter sleuths.
posted by dutchrick at 9:38 AM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


I think the real question this thread raises is why we’ve never had an FPP on biltong.
posted by nickmark at 9:51 AM on June 25, 2021 [14 favorites]


nickmark with the real talk.
posted by snwod at 10:06 AM on June 25, 2021


> Is there a Chromium alternative to Brave that someone can recommend? Touch screen gestures such as swiping backwards and pinch zoom are part of my workflow, and loosing that is a real pain.

Which operating system? Firefox has put a lot of work into refining the touchpad operations on their MacOS/iOS browsers and, as somebody who also uses them constantly, I find swiping and pinch-zooming on Firefox about as good as on Safari now. On FF89, it's probably better than Chrome. (Firefox also supports the two-finger double-tap action now, which will auto zoom the HTML element you do it over to fit the width of the browser window. This is something Safari has done for years which I use regularly, so I was overjoyed to see it in FF.)

One thing that might trip you up is that when you open a link into a new tab (which is done automatically on many websites), Safari will treat swipe-right as a go-back action, close the tab and return you to the referring page, while Firefox will require an explicit close tab action, therefore ignoring your swipe-right. This is one of those cases where neither is wrong, they just have different interpretations of workflow.
posted by at by at 10:24 AM on June 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


On FF89, it's probably better than Chrome.

I don't want to spend a bunch of time stumping for Firefox in here (I work at Mozilla, I think that's common knowledge here, but even if I mention it I feel like I'm sort of skirting a line and the blue deserves better) but... if you haven't tried it on the Mac recently there's a lot to love now? So much so that I almost feel like telling you ahead of time would spoil it?
posted by mhoye at 10:34 AM on June 25, 2021 [7 favorites]




I have Vivaldi installed on all my computers, although I never used it. Last time I tried, it was noticeably slower on every single UI interaction, and it crashed regularly despite it rarely being used. I might give it another shot.

I remember paying for Opera decades ago - it was probably one of my best purchases. The ability to turn off CSS and image loading with a single button click was invaluable in the days of reading poorly styled Geocities webpages through a 14.4Kbps modem while also loading a dozen tabs in the background.
posted by meowzilla at 12:04 PM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


*Still irked about the disappearance of the status bar.

You can fix that, you know.

Personally I'm still using Pale Moon even though the primary dev is little-by-little turning into more and more of a cantankerous crank who cares more about theoretical security issues than about whether or not it actually displays/runs modern websites, and even less about whether his program's users are actually happy. Eventual it'll turn into too much of a creaky dinosaur and there will be too many sites it just won't deal with, but for now, for me, it's the closest thing to old-school Firefox before they started "improving" it into unusability.
posted by mstokes650 at 1:25 PM on June 25, 2021 [6 favorites]


mstokes650: Eventual it'll turn into too much of a creaky dinosaur and there will be too many sites it just won't deal with,

and then you can jump ship and try Waterfox.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:39 PM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


You can fix that, you know.

Maybe I could, if the download link hadn't rotted.
posted by flabdablet at 1:51 PM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


Still irked about the disappearance of the status bar.

If only Firefox would allow its extensions to change the user interface! I miss Pentadactyl so much...
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 1:51 PM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


Still rocking Firefox and Thunderbird here; in general I feel like both are generally much more configurable and customizable than the competition, which is the big reason I keep with them. Thunderbird could stand some TLC to polish its UI perhaps, but it's functional, and I haven't found anything that does email better for my workflow.

You can fix that, you know.

Not with that extension; that's a pre-Quantum XUL Firefox Extension, so you'd need to be running an XUL-capable fork. Which makes sense, the amount of UI customization allowed to modern FF extensions is greatly reduced from where it was. Undoubtedly that's why it's not on AMO anymore.
posted by Aleyn at 2:19 PM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


With no disrespect to Vivaldi or EWW, the Emacs of browsers is unquestionably Nyxt. It's implemented in Common Lisp and has an Emacs-like interaction model.
posted by chrchr at 3:09 PM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


So having never heard of Vivaldi before, I downloaded, installed, and configured it today. By the time I was done getting used to it and getting the interface working in a way that felt comfortable, I realized I had basically replicated Firefox on my desktop.
posted by PhineasGage at 3:32 PM on June 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


Maybe I could, if the download link hadn't rotted.

that's a pre-Quantum XUL Firefox Extension, so you'd need to be running an XUL-capable fork.


Well, shows you how well I've kept my pulse on the finger of Firefox since I jumped ship. I'm sure the reason the link rotted is because Firefox doesn't support it anymore, but it works fine in Pale Moon and has a download link over there as well. I also use Foxclocks which is neatly compatible with the same status bar.
posted by mstokes650 at 4:09 PM on June 25, 2021


... privacytoolsIO ...
posted by deadaluspark at 12:45 PM on June 25

I've never come across this before, not that I'm super-security but I love to know that it's here, should I ever got annoyed enough to cover my online activity as best I can. Thx so much for this.
posted by dancestoblue at 4:37 PM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


And I read down this thread, wondering if anyone was going to mention Pale Moon, found it way down here. I've looked at it but never installed it, it seemed that it was put together by an unhappy person with axes to grind not just at Firefox but the entire world; I'd hazard a guess that the individual doesn't even like their breakfast cereal, for whatever reason, or none.

And -- I thought that Chromium browser was de-Googled Chrome, all the good of Chrome but not toxic, I'm surprised that it's not in this thread at all, or maybe I missed it. Is Chromium de-Googled Chrome? Firefox is my browser of choice, it's what's open if/when I'm on this puter, with Chromium as #2, and Opera #3. I wipe everything off Chromium and/or Opera any time I use them, wipe everything off Firefox every couple of days.

Last -- I've considered using a different puter for any time I go to Amazon (a lot). Would that just be a waste of time/energy? It'd be great if someone came up with a bucket like has been made for ppl who use Facebook, which keeps Facebooks grubby paws in just one tab. Years ago I put up a totally dead-end Facebook account, not linked to me in any way that I could tell, yet inside two months I began to get friend references to people maybe not in my life but in the periphery at least, friends of friends, ppl who also live in Austin etc -- Facebook is really, really good at what they do.
posted by dancestoblue at 4:52 PM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


Small sample but Vivaldi installed my most useful Chrome extension right out of the box. Cool, especially since Chrome has taken to disabling it on startup in the name of security.

dancestoblue Nowadays there are all sorts of containers, docks, k whatevers, that will give you a sand boxed environment without you having to switch computers. I don't think that will help much since as you point out it doesn't take much history for the data aggregators to puzzle out who you are.
posted by rdr at 4:58 PM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Vivaldi has an Android version! I was using Brave to keep hellsites like Facebook mentally quarantined — sure Firefox containers can protect my privacy, but I'm happier if I don't even have the option of seeing those site alongside everything else. I knew Brave was questionable but sounds like it's worse than I realized and now I can ditch it entirely (though the thought of Brave and Facebook fighting over ad revenue is a little funny).

I'm actually kind of surprised that anyone uses desktop-only browsers anymore. I guess I realize everyone's usage patterns are different but I'm on my phone most of the time so it's just very different from my experience. Every time someone recommends a browser (or browser fork) my first step is to look for an Android version.

These days my daily driver is Iceraven which I keep updated with FFUpdater. It's basically Firefox but with more extensions since Firefox is still waging its war on its own users.
posted by Tehhund at 5:08 PM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


I'd hazard a guess that the individual doesn't even like their breakfast cereal, for whatever reason, or none.

That's pretty damn sad!
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:32 PM on June 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


I use Waterfox buttoned up tight with Ublock Origin etc & Onetab. Opera is my wide-open fallback if a site doesn't work on Waterfox (Opera has a free one-button click VPN, useful for Alibaba after they adopted region-locking, for example). Then Pale Moon/Firefox, but have mostly stopped using the latter after Tab Mix Plus lost multi-line tabs + other associated annoying traits. Waterfox is slowly adopting some of them, joy. Multi-line tabs 2037.

If a site doesn't load properly with any of those four, didn't need to see it/buy it anyway.
posted by user92371 at 5:58 PM on June 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


> I thought that Chromium browser was de-Googled Chrome...

Chromium is one sense Chrome without the Chrome application UI. You can think of it as the core web browser upon which Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge and some other web browsers are all built. The version of Chromium that you can download and use on your computer has a minimal set of features added by third parties -- mostly the UI components necessary to use it on your computer desktop.

Since Google is the owner of Chrome and Chromium-related intellectual properties, and Google staff are the principal product owners, managers and developers for Chromium, and the Chromium development plan is directed by Google, Chromium is effectively as much a Google product as Chrome is.
posted by at by at 6:18 PM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


I use Bromite on my Android phones. It's a Chromium fork with built-in adblocking and other privacy features. I've been very happy with it. It blocks ads so well you can't get it through Google Play. And, for instance, it will play YouTube videos in the background even if you aren't a YouTubePrime member or whatever.
posted by straight at 6:34 PM on June 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


CMV The web was so much better when we just had lynx via a Unix shell account.
posted by interogative mood at 7:34 PM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


Whatever you're using, if you don't have uBlock Origin installed on it you're inflicting needless suffering on yourself for no good reason.
posted by flabdablet at 12:33 AM on June 26, 2021 [9 favorites]


Thank you very much for the iceraven suggestion. I've been using FF but was disappointed with the lack of addons. Iceraven seems to be working great.
posted by blue shadows at 12:52 AM on June 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was tiling tabs more than 20 years ago with Opera.
posted by valdesm at 2:03 AM on June 26, 2021


FYI I think (my memory is hazy) I had trouble running Iceraven and Firefox on the same phone while I was trying out Iceraven. Once I uninstalled Firefox the problems went away.
posted by Tehhund at 4:35 AM on June 26, 2021


I'd like to echo the annoyance with Firefox removing multiline tabs, every so often Firefox updates itself in such a way as to disable the hack I use to re-enable those tabs, and every time the first thing I do is look up how to get the hack working again. It seems obvious that the code for the feature is still in there, they should just expose it to the settings UI again!
posted by JHarris at 5:53 PM on June 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


While I don't want to look down on derivative, experimental or otherwise niche browsers - Firefox-derived or not - you need to know that many of those browsers are shipped by small teams or single developers, who often don't have modern update infrastructure or security expertise backing them up.

I respect what some of these groups are trying to do, and the whole point of the open source exercise is that they're 100% allowed to do it. And you can do what you like, run what you want, obviously. But the internet's a dangerous place these days, and if security really matters to you, you have to be on a current release from a major vendor that can keep itself current.
posted by mhoye at 7:35 AM on June 27, 2021 [5 favorites]


As long as it gets frequent updates, which I agree is crucial in this day and age, I'm not sure that I see why it has to be from a major vendor.
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:53 AM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


I think mhoye's point is that security is hard, so having more (and more experienced/skilled) people on a project makes it more likely that the security will be done right. In general/in theory/with lots of caveats, etc. etc.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:00 AM on June 27, 2021 [5 favorites]


I mostly use Firefox, but Mozilla's breaking my ability to have the tabs below the URL bar where I fucking want them every couple of releases is making me eyeball switching to Vivaldi at some point possibly in the near future.

Of course, Vivaldi just broke the same thing in their 4.0 release and it took days of googling to find some custom CSS that would fix it again, so maybe I'll just chuck it all and go back to Lynx.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 12:57 PM on June 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


if security really matters to you, you have to be on a current release from a major vendor that can keep itself current

I agree with this, which is exactly why my response to having my status bar yoinked in favour of this infuriating thing that occludes part of the visible page every time I float over a link and gives me no place to put extension buttons except the already overcrowded top toolbar is kvetching rather than svitching.

I have been finding Mozilla's UI update and marketing partner decisions infuriating and baffling more often than not for several years now. If there existed another browser that worked as well as Firefox does now and was as tweakable as Firefox used to be pre-Quantum and was as secure as Firefox is post-Quantum and supported functionality equivalent to uBlock Origin, NoScript, Torrent Control, Bypass Paywalls Clean, DownThemAll, Video DownloadHelper, Export Cookies and Stylus and had the backing of a substantial non-profit development organization, I'd switch. But there isn't.
posted by flabdablet at 1:25 PM on June 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


I do not understand why, in this world of 16:9 and ultrawide monitors, no other browser seems interested in putting tabs in a list down the side of the screen.

Edge has that option.

This is not an endorsement.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 5:32 PM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


I have been finding Mozilla's UI update and marketing partner decisions infuriating and baffling more often than not for several years now.

Seriously. If you showed people FF for Android's current UI alongside the previous one and asked them which one came first and which was released to solve the other's elementary-school-level problems, I would be absolutely shocked if anyone guessed correctly. The new UI seems to violate so many design principles that I'm just constantly boggled at the decisions that were made and constantly frustrated by how they actually constrain the use experience. And the UI bugs! I have so much contempt for whoever decided to take a decent working UI (which itself was less useful than its predecessor in several ways) and replace it with this broken thing. Firefox is still - even with all that - so much better than all the alternatives that I don't know why more people don't use it, but I really wish there were some good, flexible, anti-commercial open source browser whose updates were something to actually look forward to rather than dread.

(Not to mention a browser that actually gives a shit about the user experience for people with visual/motor disabilities - which ultimately includes, you know, all of us as we get old - but I've been beating that horse for years and the rate of improvement has been pretty damn close to zero.)
posted by trig at 1:19 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


I respect what some of these groups are trying to do, and the whole point of the open source exercise is that they're 100% allowed to do it. And you can do what you like, run what you want, obviously. But the internet's a dangerous place these days, and if security really matters to you, you have to be on a current release from a major vendor that can keep itself current.

Also just to underline, bold, and italicize flabdablet's point from above: that's exactly why Mozilla's moves to make Firefox support fewer and fewer workflows and user needs is so problematic. You don't get to have it both ways: users whose needs are unsupported are going to look for alternatives, and it sure would be nice if "a major vendor that can keep themselves current" were committed to providing them instead of requiring users to choose between safety and actual functionality and accessibility.
posted by trig at 3:09 AM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


So it's a few days later, and I kept playing around a bit with Vivaldi on my phone and desktop, and now it seems I have made the switch, leaving Opera and Firefox behind. Thanks for the post, storyboard.
posted by PhineasGage at 4:34 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


I agree with mhoye's concern about small teams making forks. Who to trust to have good security practices is a tough balance to strike. In general you would expect big organizations that live and breathe technology (e.g., Google and Mozilla) to get it right but sometimes they don't. That said you're right that we can trust them more than random individuals or random small teams.

At the same time it's important to me that some kind of non-Blink non-WebKit browser remain viable. One of the best things about the modern web is support for standards and as others have pointed out if a single browser engine dominates then standards lose a lot of their value. So I tried Firefox on Android and I found it pretty unusable — lots of things work in Chrome but not in Firefox. I kept it around due to the upsides, mostly running extensions like uBlock Origin and Tampermonkey. Then Mozilla killed Tampermonkey on Android and the benefits no longer outweighed the negatives so I abandoned Firefox. (I still have it on desktop but I do at least 95% of my browsing on mobile). Then someone recommended Iceraven and now I'm back. Is it a security risk? A bit. It's based on recent Firefox releases so it's not much of one. But it's true that it's probably riskier than using Mozilla's official release.

So I accept the risk because it matters to me and I can use Tampermonkey to fix mobile UIs (mostly Gocomics and MetaFilter). Hopefully someday Mozilla will stop ruining the best things about their browser and I'll go back to them.
posted by Tehhund at 5:33 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


Just to counterbalance Metafilter's highly specific and demanding poweruser bias.. I love Firefox. I love all the changes to Firefox. The new Android version is great and a big improvement on previous ones. I think it's a bit of a shame that addons can't modify as much of the UI as they used to but I understand why they did it. Partly for security / code quality issues, partly to harmonize with addon architecture of other browsers so that cross-browser addons are easier to build. Mozilla and Firefox are great, just as is.

I understand the frustration of the power users here who really want some specific UI feature or change. I understand they think their way is better. Welcome to product design! I think Mozilla's approach it is very good and they make the right compromises for the majority of their users along the way. I don't have an answer for folks who really, really want to customize or hack something unusual for themselves.
posted by Nelson at 8:11 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yeah I could have been more specific in my criticisms. I think Firefox's move from "extensions can do nearly anything" to web extensions was the right choice. My criticism is sometime in the past year they said "oh and also you can't use a bunch of web extensions on Android even though they worked in the past." But of course I'm just another power user who supports anything Mozilla does until they mess with my extremely-specific desires, and just because I want my favorite functionality back doesn't mean it's actually a good use of their resources.
posted by Tehhund at 8:37 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


I have been finding Mozilla's UI update and marketing partner decisions infuriating and baffling more often than not for several years now.

For lack of a less contentious way to put it, Mozilla until last year was basically run by their Chief Marketing Officer. Taking over users' browsers to promote Mr. Robot was just the most visible of these things. The only reason I use Firefox at all is because I -- currently -- merely dislike Chrome more. Mozilla needs to stop playing marketing BS games, they need to stop breaking user profiles (followed by "oops!" with a blushing grin), they need to stop breaking QoL features people rely on. They won't, but they need to. Mozilla is still run by the same Silicon Valley Good Ol' Boys (and Girls) club that spawned Brendon Eich, and their executives' user-hostile decisions (no shade to the devs who are probably trying to keep the boat afloat) are probably a huge reason why Firefox perennially struggles to gain market share.

Spoiler: Firefox struggles to distinguish themselves from Google because Mozilla, just like Google, doesn't seem to care user hostile decisions and doesn't seem to care about breaking users' shit every few releases. "We care about privacy" is extremely good and extremely important, but "We care about not breaking your shit" might gain Firefox bit more market share, or at least keep people like me from jumping ship when they get fed up with the user-hostility.
posted by tclark at 2:13 PM on June 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


I agree that Firefox must not just survive but prosper, and not catering to marketing is the best way to do that long term. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Firefox had put an unfamiliar link among the top sites on my home page, with a little "SPONSORED" next to it. I flew into a computer-rage (which is admittedly less than a regular rage, if just because computers do this to me so often [see below]) and immediately tracked down that setting and disabled it. This crap does absolutely nothing to inspire confidence in Mozilla for me.

[On it happening often--a couple of months ago Windows updated and, upon rebooting and logging in, the screen actually popped up a full screen ad offering a Special Rate on a year of Office 365. MICROSOFT NO]
posted by JHarris at 8:38 PM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


(I actually would have considered it, it was like 50% off, in literally any other event. I have need of a good office suite! But I was seeing red.)
posted by JHarris at 8:40 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


Speaking of computer-rage, I learned recently that upgrading to Windows 11 will require a Microsoft account. And 凸ಠ益ಠ)凸 that.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:50 PM on June 28, 2021 [7 favorites]


Um, I have innumerable accounts with web sites large and small. If MS wants to have Windows users setup a user account, why is that worth even a moment's complaint?
posted by PhineasGage at 8:53 PM on June 28, 2021


To you, apparently it isn't. But I am not you.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:59 PM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


A computer is a lot more than just a web browsing machine, and this means you have to tell Microsoft who you are even if you don't touch the web, or use it mostly on your phone. Further, this sounds like you can't even install Windows without an internet connection. It's awful.
posted by JHarris at 3:54 AM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


I literally don't understand the problem. As the linked article states, the only available delivery mechanism for the software is over the internet - I haven't even seen a laptop with a CD/DVD drive in a decade! And what's to stop anybody from setting up a burner email address, registering Windows 11, and then being done with it? I don't disagree in the least about the importance of security and privacy, I just genuinely don't understand why there's so much heat here opposing a trivial, easily spoofable "registration." What are the specific fears?
posted by PhineasGage at 6:05 AM on June 29, 2021


what's to stop anybody from setting up a burner email address, registering Windows 11, and then being done with it?

Nothing. The infuriating part is that it used to be possible to achieve the end result of doing that without jumping through pointless hoops to get there. That, and a well founded suspicion that you're going to need that same burner email address kept alive forever because at some point they are certain to lock you out of your own device until you've exchanged more emails over it. See also: Apple ID.

The only reason Microsoft wants everybody to have a Microsoft account is for marketing purposes. You know it. I know it. They know it.

And in nearly sixty years on this planet I have never encountered a marketing-led initiative to which the correct response has been anything other than a heartfelt Fuck Off.
posted by flabdablet at 6:46 AM on June 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


Yup.

Also, the idea that one is required to log into a Microsoft account to use the computer one bought provokes a visceral reaction. Forget that you can spoof it or whatever, it's a matter of principle for a lot of people. It's also not a new battleground, this has been a thing in slightly different permutations across a number of domains. It's not a new tactic nor is the backlash.

I do think that it's a losing battle, though, in a hold-back-the-tide sense. I don't see Microsoft backing down, and this is the way of things nowadays -- smart TVs are a good example in some cases.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:54 AM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Surely this will be the year of Debian on the desktop :-)

Holding back the tide is unnecessary. Just move out of Florida.
posted by flabdablet at 6:55 AM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


The problem as I see it is they will use the new "everyone has an account" ""feature"" to push one drive even harder. Things that should be on your machine will suddenly default to being on one drive. And then opsie, you are out of space. Luckily the marketing department is making a monthly subscription available for more space.
posted by Mitheral at 6:56 AM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Ah, gotcha - thanks for the explanations. Just checked and it looks like I have 4 different Microsoft 'accounts', I logged in to one of them more than a year ago, and I haven't been nagged to do so again since. Hoping y'all's fears are wrong about what might be required in the new version. But y'all are probably right.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:14 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


They got me to finally make a Microsoft account for the first time about 7 months ago when I decided I just didn't want to keep trying to make Numbers or OpenOffice do what Excel does, even though Excel does stuff...inconsistently. So I guess I have a Microsoft account, now.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:19 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Making the Microsoft Store / OneDrive / WhateverNext account the same thing as the local Windows login account breaks a whole pile of shared-machine use cases that are easily dealt with if those two ideas are kept separate.

Separation of concerns is simply sound design, and I absolutely deplore the relentless industry push away from that in favour of walled-garden "single-sign-on" approaches that are supposed to be more convenient but somehow manage so not to be whenever shit goes pear-shaped. Which, this being IT, it's bound to do on a regular basis.

I don't log my Chromium browsers into a Google account and nor do I log my Firefox browsers into a Mozilla account because I do not want the browsers on my various devices trying to make each other the same; in my experience that kind of thing is never reliable enough to be set-and-forget and the weird sync failures it always causes are always more frustrating than simply living without sync to begin with.

I also won't use either browser's walled-garden password manager, capable though they may be. I'd much rather handle that stuff outside all my browsers with KeePassX, because I absolutely do not trust browser vendors not to fuck up my password database on a whim, maybe during an update, maybe during an attempt to cross-device sync it. As a bonus, this has kept me from having to bother coming to grips with Mozilla's relatively recent changes to its inbuilt password manager's UI.

And again, there are separation of concerns issues there. I would need to create and sign into a Firefox Account to sync passwords across my devices with the inbuilt Firefox Lockwise password manager, at which point my devices would attempt to start cross-pushing histories and profile settings and fuck knows what else until I worked out how to turn that off, assuming doing so is even still possible. Point is I don't want to have to care if it's possible.

When I want to sync passwords across devices, I do it by syncing my .kdbx password database file using a file sync service. Simple, easy, predictable, compartmented. This not only works across devices, it works across browsers from multiple vendors. Any browsers, whether they have password management built in or not. And it's not going to stop working even if the particular sync service I'm currently using goes belly-up either temporarily or permanently.

I do log the Keybase client on all my personal devices into the same Keybase account because Keybase is for messaging. A few of those devices have multiple local user accounts that are all controlled by me but used for different things. KeePassX syncs across some of those user accounts; Keybase doesn't. Nothing else does either. That's how I wanted it so that's how I set it up.

Vendor lock-in is beloved of marketing departments everywhere. I do my level best to keep it out of my IT life. I can't think of a single thing I use that I could not reasonably quickly replace with something functionally similar from a different vendor of my own choosing, but remaining able to do that involves ignoring and/or duplicating a large and increasing amount of the functionality built into mainstream consumer IT goods.

Luckily, the world is full of excellent open source software that is so far keeping the sidestepping of lock-in quite feasible for those of us whose main priority it remains.
posted by flabdablet at 8:37 AM on June 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


Vendor lock-in is beloved of marketing departments everywhere.

Some of us here who have been in IT long enough will remember the era of single-vendor mainframes/minicomputers, and the delight and relief users felt when PCs started becoming available in the 80's-90's with which they could get their actual needs met (since the mainframe could never be flexible/capable enough to accommodate everyone's various needs). And of course relative chaos ensued - in management's eyes at least - because everyone was doing their own thing and there was no way to aggregate and control all that disparate data.

Now in recent years the pendulum has begun to swing the other way, with vendors thinking that offering vertical strategies to rein in all these renegade-loner PCs and give management access to to that tasty integrated data (not to mention those vendors skimming off their own data) will make them lots of money...and they're right, regardless of whether that really serves the end-users' needs or not.

I wonder if I'll live long enough to see the pendulum swing back again. I'm sure we can all think of a few companies that will be first up against the wall when if the revolution comes.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:41 AM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


flabdablet already addresses the jumping-through-pointless-hoops aspect of forcing Windows users to use a Microsoft Account. But consider: it makes it impossible to completely air gap a machine, you have to at least connect it to the internet once. It also rules out machines without networking hardware at all, and it means you have to get networking going during installation and/or activation. Installing a system is a tricky time. Nothing extraneous should stand in the way of getting things running.

Further, it signifies that Microsoft is still chasing Apple's design decisions, and that is something many people now would like them not to do.
posted by JHarris at 1:45 PM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Greg_Ace: I learned recently that upgrading to Windows 11 will require a Microsoft account.

Switching to Linux, which for me happened in 2015, really is the gift that keeps on giving.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:32 PM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


I've had Linux frequently on my spare machine (it's great for older laptops), and once in a while on my main one. I can do all the work stuff I do on a Linux installation, but sadly for gaming there's always that one game I have to investigate that doesn't have a Linux version, and because those are often new indie games, may or may not work under Wine or analogues.
posted by JHarris at 7:01 PM on June 29, 2021


Do you guys not have Mickeysoft accounts? Really?

Doooont caaaaaare. Also, stuck in ATL airport super late, and barely make sense. But still.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:16 PM on June 29, 2021


Do you guys not have Mickeysoft accounts? Really?

Nope.

Really.
posted by Mitheral at 7:54 PM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


c’mon man


everybody else is doing it
posted by Huffy Puffy at 8:10 PM on June 29, 2021


Sshyeah right. Hey everyone, found the MS narc!
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:01 PM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


I genuinely do not understand why loving tabs on top so profoundly that you must do everything you can to deny other people the ability to have tabs on bottom is apparently a condition of employment for browser developers anymore.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:51 PM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


The really galling thing is, on Android, the browsers [Firefox at the very least] have switched it to put the URL bar, hamburger menu and tab button on the bottom! You still reveal it by scrolling down though, which is unintuitive! Did Apple patent pull-down-to-reveal?!
posted by JHarris at 11:55 PM on June 29, 2021


I can do all the work stuff I do on a Linux installation, but sadly for gaming there's always that one game I have to investigate that doesn't have a Linux version, and because those are often new indie games, may or may not work under Wine or analogues.

I'm surprised that gaming is what would keep you on windows. I think the only pain point for Linux gaming at this point is anti-cheat software, but other than that, if you use Steam on Linux, in my experience pretty much everything "just works" at this point. Especially if you keep up with the Glorious Eggroll version of Proton.
posted by Alex404 at 2:36 AM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


on Android, the browsers [Firefox at the very least] have switched it to put the URL bar, hamburger menu and tab button on the bottom!

At least for the time being they're still letting you put it back the sane way if you want to, so of course I immediately did. But I'm fully expecting the day to arrive, probably within two years, when some fuckhead marketroid decides for me that I must have my Android browser set up the way they think is better, and makes the devs remove that option.
posted by flabdablet at 3:05 AM on June 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


RE: tabs

really though - did y'all SEE where safari is going with tabs in Monterey‽‽‽ I'm in love, and I have never used Safari as my daily driver.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:08 AM on June 30, 2021


on Android, the browsers [Firefox at the very least] have switched it to put the URL bar, hamburger menu and tab button on the bottom!

Settings > Customize > Toolbar > select 'Top'
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:56 AM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


did y'all SEE where safari is going with tabs in Monterey‽‽‽

You mean the way Apple has decided that users now have no option but to adapt to their new look because they think it's prettier this way?

Colour me shocked.

Not.
posted by flabdablet at 8:57 AM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


Settings > Customize > Toolbar > select 'Top'

We should run a sweep on how many updates it will take for that option to disappear.

I'm tipping: gone by Q2 2023.
posted by flabdablet at 8:59 AM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


You mean the way Apple has decided that users now have no option but to adapt to their new look because they think it's prettier this way?

Yeah I mean, I never used Safari before so I'm not upset about being unable to revert Safari to a prior config. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut I am very excited about tab groups!

And for Nelson's request:

I would like one specific feature in Firefox though, to color tabs based on the overall color / theme of the website they're open for. There are a few tab coloring extensions for Firefox but they're mostly just random colors or task-specific. I want something automated that is still representative of the site.

they are doing that in this Safari update and it does look really beautiful on pages where it works. Woo!
posted by lazaruslong at 10:11 AM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


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