I switched to Firefox this month. Had to, with everything that's going on in Chrome. After struggling to remember to use Firefox, I just signed out of all my accounts in Chrome. Now I reach for Firefox much more naturally. Soon enough it should take.
Great to see the emphasis on DevTools in this release. DevTools have definitely much improved since I last tried, but they are still glitchy compared to Chrome. For example, I was using the JS debugger, and for some reason breakpoints wouldn't "hold"—after being stopped for some period of time (not long), the page would refresh. Also little things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613957, which I was able to report. It was frustrating. Had to go back to Chrome for development. Still, it was nice to see many features that Chrome doesn't have, like breakpoint logging, which is nice when you want to insert a log into third party code.
And as a browser from a non-dev perspective, it's great. Great to know this browser is all about privacy instead of just trying to provide the bare minimum to keep people on board. Great to have the Facebook Container.
Since you brought up logging out and in, remember that Firefox Containers are very useful for things you wanna let logged in all the time (e.g., Facebook, maybe Google) so their tracking gets a little worse because your cookies are more isolated.
My preferred anti-tracking setup is Firefox with the Multi-Account Containers and the Temporary Containers addons (and uBlock Origin of course.)
Multi-Account Contaners lets me set up permanent containers for (groups of) sites I want to stay logged in to. I check the "always open this site in <container name>" box.
Temporary Containers is set up to open new sites (on middle / control click) in new, temporary containers. These containers work like private browsing windows, but store their data for 10 minutes after being closed. So undo close tab works, history works, but each new site is in its own container. And 10 minutes after its closed (or when the browser as a whole closes) all the cookies get deleted.
I ran Privacy Badger for a while, but I have never actually seen it do anything. Not sure I messed up something, or if it was due to me already having an aggressive block list on uBlock Origin that left PB with nothing to do.
An aggressive block list could do it. Privacy Badger "learns" what is tracking you, so it does take a little bit to start being effective when you first start using it. It caches 34 trackers on theverge.com with uBlock Origin turned off for me, and 9 with uBlock Origin turned on.
My preferred anti-tracking adds Cookie Auto delete [0] to this. In the HN container, I keep HN cookies. Anything opened from HN will stay in the HN container and non-HN sites get cookies deleted shortly.
One thing that turns me off using Firefox Containers in earnest is that they are not integrated into Firefox Sync and nor does there appear to be a way to backup the URLs/containers as with other extensions - so I end up having to rebuild the containers on another machine or when I need to delete a buggy profile.
That's a great change. Containers are one of the things that made me move back from Chrome, it just feels far more useful to me to mix different contexts in one window than having to run entirely separate browser profiles as I had in Chrome. The one thing that prevented me from creating more elaborate container setups was the lack of sync, it just gets too annoying to set that kind of stuff up repeatedly. But with sync I'll probably look at creating more fine-grained containers than the basic work/personal setup I have right now, e.g. separating out Google in a separate container.
Firefox member here – thanks a lot for reporting those bugs! Thanks to detailed reports Debugger could improve and glitches should become more and more a rarity.
You're welcome. Thanks a lot for your work on Firefox!
Wish I could have reported the breakpoint page refresh bug, but I wasn't sure how I could possibly isolate/replicate or describe beyond what I described above. And that's probably not very useful? The small one I linked was easy to describe and replicate.
Anyway, reporting bugs to Firefox definitely seems worth the time spent because it means having a browser that doesn't exist solely to benefit Google. Long live the World Wide Web!
PS. Really like so many other DevTools details I didn't mention in my post above. For example, the '...', 'scroll' and 'flex' indicators/toggles: https://imgur.com/a/yIlhDcJ. Also the console reverse-search with Ctrl-R. And many others.
Thanks for your work on Firefox!
I feel more comfortable with Firefox Devtools overall, but I keep using Chrome for debugging for one single reason : Firefox can't handle extensive log.
I'm working on code where sometimes infinite loops occurs. When I want to investigate on these loops, I cannot use any breakpoints because it's using the same route than it used 10 000 times before, so I usually log a lot of data, then manually kill the Chrome tab and I can still run through 1 million console lines smoothly.
Really hope Firefox will be able to handle that one day.
Yeah the debugger certainly still leaves some things to be desired. When using a fairly sizeable react project, I set a XHR breakpoint, it was triggered, then the whole tab became unresponsive (dev tools included)
This happens to me a lot in the Chrome developer tools as well. Especially with hot reloading, so would love any advice to help with it. Chrome is the only application I ever have to force quit.
Happens to me in Chrome too, specifically when I reload a page that's stopped at a breakpoint. Instead of force quitting the whole application, check out Window -> Task manager. There you can force quit just a single, specific tab without closing the whole application.
The chrome task manager (hotkey Shift+Esc) is good for killing tabs
For large pages where source changes cause problems I will sometimes put logic inside conditional breakpoints. It's not great for huge changes (though you technically can put a lot of code in there) but for small things like quickly sanitizing null inputs it works fine.
Favorite thing about firefox devtools is in the network tab you can right-click a network request and just resend it as-is. Don't think you can do that in chrome.
I had to ditch chrome because it performed abysmally, tried to use Safari but just couldn't get used to it, so went back to Firefox and was very pleasantly surprised ... great Mac OS experience.
That has to be a joke, zooming barely works on macOS (and has to be enabled using an about:config flag). It's decent if you just use an old fashioned mouse though and not a magic trackpad.
They have in theory, but the fix isn't working for a lot of people, and Firefox continues murdering their battery. Firefox devs are aware but AFAIK their attention is focused elsewhere at the moment. Quite sad, because of all the people I got to switch to Firefox, all but one that experiences this issue has switched back to Chromium.
Privacy and fighting browser hegemony is great, but stark few people are willing to sacrifice nearly half their battery life for it.
If you're interested in dev tools, I can't recommend eval villain enough. It only works on Firefox, but it helps a lot with identifying xss vulnerabilities.
FF dev tools are on par or even better (IMO) than Chrome, but the last few versions, it seems they have changed/dropped sourcemap support so it doesn't work at all. I went back to FF a couple years ago, but now I'm disappointed that the dev tools are not working properly and will go back for dev purposes only. I hope FF gets it working. I'd file a bug, but 'sourcemap support not working' isn't exactly all that helpful. Anyway, it doesn't work on any of my apps and works fine in Chrome. I hope they fix it at some point as I think their dev tools are generally better than Chrome (esp. the console).
Yeah, new Edgium is just as slick as Chrome was when it started. I'm now using only Edgium exclusively; Super fast; No lagging anywhere. Super smooth scrolling etc; I hope it stays like that;
i feel a bit guilty using windows and edge these days. like i'm betraying my principles. but it's just so easy and i have to prioritize stress to what matters.
Breakpoint logging sounds like just using conditional breakpoints with a console.log wrapper around the expression, which you can do today. Not saying it's better or worse, but if you need that functionality in Chrome there's your solution :)
Ah, the self-anointed "Brave" browser, that believes what humanity really needs is a middleman between publishers and readers, skimming off the ad revenue.
I still don't see what's to like on brave. It's basically chrome with ublock origin and https anywhere and like maybe one or two more privacy-oriented extension - why is there a need for a different browser, like why isn't that only an extension? Also, once chrome disables adblockers I doubt they would have the manpower to fork chromium.
Great to see the emphasis on DevTools in this release. DevTools have definitely much improved since I last tried, but they are still glitchy compared to Chrome. For example, I was using the JS debugger, and for some reason breakpoints wouldn't "hold"—after being stopped for some period of time (not long), the page would refresh. Also little things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613957, which I was able to report. It was frustrating. Had to go back to Chrome for development. Still, it was nice to see many features that Chrome doesn't have, like breakpoint logging, which is nice when you want to insert a log into third party code.
And as a browser from a non-dev perspective, it's great. Great to know this browser is all about privacy instead of just trying to provide the bare minimum to keep people on board. Great to have the Facebook Container.
Thank you Firefox!