Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox
- Reference: 1664188032
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/26/firefox_power_user_guide/
- Source link:
Some of the snags of Chrome and its derivatives, such as Microsoft Edge, are of course that you're handing over your data and your credentials to big, profit-making corporations. Browsers based on Google's code also [2]limit what ad blockers can do .
Brave's marketing suggests it is the privacy-conscious choice, but we're skeptical. Brave [3]dabbles in cryptocurrencies , and indeed [4]has its own . The Reg FOSS Desk regards all cryptocurrencies as a Ponzi scheme, and that alone would damn it for us… But there's more. Brave has history for [5]silently rewriting affiliate links , and pocketing the proceeds. And of course its boss, Brandon Eich, [6]left Mozilla due his controversial backing of legislation against gay marriage .
[7]
But for us at The Reg FOSS desk, the killer feature that Firefox does better than most Chrome-based browsers is vertical tabs. Even if you're not used to them, if you do a lot of surfing, you owe it to yourself to try to get used to a vertical tab bar. They have a whole list of advantages:
They make more efficient use of horizontal screen space, plentiful on modern widescreen displays
You can have dozens open at once and still read their titles, when horizontal tabs shrink to uninformative icons
Optionally, you can arrange them hierarchically, grouping related tabs, and hiding, revealing, or bookmarking groups as one
The bigger minimum tab size lets the tab show status information for each page
Finally, some add-ons let you search or sort your tabs
Vivaldi can do some of this, although our testing found its vertical tabs don't interoperate well with its new email client. Microsoft's Edge has a pretty good version. We've also read that Brave is experimenting with its own [8]version of the feature, but we haven't tried it.
There are Chrome add-ons that fake it, but not on all pages, and worse still, they can't hide the built-in horizontal tabs at the top – so instead of saving screen space, you just waste more.
[9]
[10]
It's worth it. Give it a try for a week and we suspect you'll become a convert and thank us for it. But there are more tools on offer as well. For clarity, this applies equally to the current Firefox forks [11]Waterfox and [12]LibreWolf . With a bit of experimentation, you can achieve similar in [13]Pale Moon , [14]Basilisk or [15]Seamonkey too.
There are multiple vertical tabs add-ons for Firefox so you can choose based on the features you want
If just one piece of objective evidence might persuade you, it is the sheer number of different extensions available that implement this function. We tried five. [16]Vertical Tabs Reloaded has a simple, flat-look implementation, but with one big snag: you can't pull a tab out of a window and make it a window of its own, nor can you move a tab from one window to another.
[17]Sidebery brings some interesting new functions, such as integrating bookmarks into the sidebar, but we found it a bit unstable. [18]Tab Center Reborn works and its tabs grow to show two lines of description when you have few enough open that it has room. [19]Tree Style Tab is one of the oldest of this type of extension, and it is so customizable it even has extensions of its own. If you like a hierarchical tab bar, it's the one we'd recommend. If you're new to vertical tabs, though, we suggest keeping it simple with [20]Vertical Tabs , which does the basics and no more.
Once you've picked one and installed it, you will notice a new issue: now you've got two tab bars. An unfortunate change in the recent "Quantum" versions of Firefox is that extensions can't readily hide or close the built-in tab bar, which is one of the reasons that we sometimes feel that Mozilla has taken its eyes off the customizability goal of late. Never fear, though, you can still do it. All that's needed is a tiny config file.
[21]
Waterfox users are all set from first installation, but if you use upstream Firefox, you'll first need to enable such customizations. Enter about:config in the address bar, and acknowledge the warning that appears. Enter "legacy" in the search box, and you should see a setting called toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets . It's normally set to false ; double-click that word to toggle it to true .
[22]Firefox 105 is here, and it's faster and more memory-frugal
[23]Firefox kills another tracking cookie workaround
[24]Mozilla opens testing for Manifest v3 extensions in Firefox
[25]Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100
Now, you need to find where to put the file. Modern versions of Firefox hide the menu bar, in another of Mozilla's efforts to ape Chrome. We like traditional menus so we turn it back on: Press Alt to open the menus, go to View , then down to Toolbars and tick Menu Bar . Now, go to the Help menu, and pick More Troubleshooting Information . In this screen, there's a line called Profile Directory and this contains an Open Directory button. Click that, and it will open your Firefox profile folder. In there, make a new folder, called chrome (all in lower case). Go into the new folder, and create a new file called userChrome.css . This is where the settings to hide the tab bar go.
Open the new file in a text editor, and copy and paste this into it: /* to hide the native tabs */
#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }
/* to hide the sidebar header */
#sidebar-header {
visibility: collapse;
}
Save the file, and restart the browser.
If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, could you please make this process a little easier? That'd be great. Thanks.
If you use more than one computer regularly, [26]Firefox Sync keeps bookmarks, passwords, and so on synchronized among them, and it also works between Firefox, Waterfox, and LibreWolf (although in the latter, you need to enable it in the Preferences first).
Mozilla's [27]Extensions page has dozens of others. Here's our essential collection. [28]UBlock Origin cuts a lot of distraction from the Web (but we'd be grateful if you'd whitelist The Reg ). [29]Multithreaded Download Manager has recently displaced [30]DownThemAll as our preferred download manager. [31]Tab Hunter will quickly find tabs lost among multiple windows. [32]Disable Autoplay stops a lot of annoying self-starting videos. Sometimes, Firefox Sync can result in multiple copies of some bookmarks, in which case [33]Bookmark Dupes will sort that out.
Once you have a dozen or so add-ons, your browser's toolbar can get a bit cluttered, but there's a fix for that too
Once you've installed all of those, your toolbar might be getting a bit cluttered, but that's easy to fix. Right-click anywhere on the toolbar, pick "Customize toolbar" and you can consign less-used add-on icons to the overflow menu. You can also remove any unneeded spacers or controls by just dragging them off the toolbar, optionally hide the title bar, and so on.
Customize your toolbar and just drag less-used buttons into the overflow menu
There are too many more [34]tweaks and adjustments to list. Among the handy ones, we like "zoom text only" (on the View|Zoom menu), which leaves pictures and layout unscaled while you zoom in and out. There are separate [35]keystrokes for zooming the whole page, or just the text, as well as for controlling media playback and most other functionality. There's a [36]task manager for monitoring memory or CPU-hogging tabs.
Waterfox has the edge in a few cases, such as integrating with Unity's global menu bar, but Firefox runs on more different OSes. For this vulture, 20 years after it appeared, Firefox (or Waterfox) remains our go-to and default browser, on every desktop and laptop OS we use. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, all the BSDs, plus mobile OSes. It keeps all our settings synched, blocks many distractions, and uses fewer resources. OK, we admit, we do usually keep Chrome or Edge around, mainly for webmail and some other communications tools, but Firefox remains our weapon of choice. ®
Get our [37]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/01/firefox_89_redesign/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/14/googles_manifest_v3_extension_plan/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/15/brave_web_browser_hits_version_1/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/20/brave_search/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/09/brave_affiliate_links_bug/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2014/04/03/mozilla_brendan_eich_ceo_quits/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YzHMncYZdf8Rislwh2SlFwAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/464
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YzHMncYZdf8Rislwh2SlFwAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YzHMncYZdf8Rislwh2SlFwAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.waterfox.net/
[12] https://librewolf.net/
[13] https://www.palemoon.org/
[14] https://www.basilisk-browser.org/
[15] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
[16] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs-reloaded/
[17] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
[18] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabcenter-reborn/
[19] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
[20] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/
[21] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YzHMncYZdf8Rislwh2SlFwAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/firefox_105/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/30/firefox_tracking_cookie_loophole/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/20/mozilla_opens_testing_for_manifest/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/03/firefox_100_released/
[26] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/sync/
[27] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/
[28] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
[29] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multithreaded-download-manager/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
[30] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/
[31] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabhunter/
[32] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autoplay/
[33] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-dupes/
[34] https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/15-coolest-firefox-tricks-ever.html
[35] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly?#w_media-shortcuts
[36] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-extensions-are-slowing-firefox
[37] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Vivaldi is Chrome, isn't it? (Well, chromium). I tried Vivaldi, but did not like it. At all. Choice is good, or would be, if we still had any. There's Chrome, the Apple-thing, and Firefox, which they are trying to break, actively. Their main aim seems to mimick Chrome, which makes me angry.
Also, extensions I need / expect / enjoy no longer work. I'm using Waterfox at the moment.
[Author here]
I *want* to like Vivaldi, but I don't get on with its UI either. But then, I never really got on with Opera, either. Vivaldi being some of the Opera team's effort to re-create it after selling the company to Kunlun & Qihoo 360.
Actually, and it somewhat banes me to say it, Edge is well on its way to being the best, most effective, no-nonsense Chromium fork these days.
I agree re Mozilla's deeply foolish and misguided efforts to ape Chrome, poorly.
However, so far, it *is* still possible to bypass a lot of it, turn stuff back on, and then get it to work well.
The new "webextensions" selection has caught up quite a lot since Mozilla's _also_ deeply foolish and misguided killing of XUL and its vast extensions ecosystem. The new ones can now do a lot of what the old ones can do, and while some have not made it across the transition, in many cases I have found replacements which work -- such as the Multithreaded Download Manager I linked in the article.
Not for me, I'm afraid.
" Modern versions of Firefox hide the menu bar, in another of Mozilla's efforts to ape Chrome."
And that folks is one of the reasons that why I am glad that I switched to Palemoon.
Why fix something when it ain't broke?
I tried Mageia not long ago to see how it was getting along. Not bad, but one of the programs missing from the repo was Palemoon, so I had to use Firefox in order to side-load Palemoon and let me tell you after a long time away from Firefox I was horrified. Having to scratch around to find the tools I needed was a shock and I was so glad to get back to Palemoon which despite its somewhat odd reputation has kept most of the things like visible menu bars and ditching all that Australis crap the first drove me away from Firefox.
If you use Palemoon you will go back in time when Firefox was on top form without all the irritating "improvements", and that is a good thing in my opinion.
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
Easy to get it back. Right click on the tab bar or tool bar. There's a check box labelled 'Menu Bar.'
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
Indeed so -- which I did specifically spell out in the article. :-)
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
Degraded memory goes with the beard colour.
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
Cool, now how do we get back tabs on bottom without any CSS hacks? :)
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
[Article author here]
I tend to agree with you but my concerns are that Palemoon took an older version of the engine, which lacks important features such as multi-process support. Basilisk seemed to have something a little more modern, but also seems to have stalled over ownership issues.
I know that many people were upset when the new themes were adopted -- twice -- but I didn't really care about that.
If XUL addons are still important, then Waterfox Classic is still around, still gets updates, uses the last ever version of the core engine (not merely the last LTS version) that supports XUL.
The Waterfox Project is open that there are security issues in it that they cannot fix and that they don't recommend or promote it because of this. The Palemoon/Basilisk project does not say this, but I am confident that the same issues and more also apply to them. That is one of my concerns.
But if Palemoon works for you, then great.
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
It's more and more difficult to use Waterfox Classic with web 3.0 in all its jquery glory. I'm not clear what the advantage of non-classic Waterfox is over Firefox ESR though.
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
> I'm not clear what the advantage of non-classic Waterfox is over Firefox ESR though.
Yeah, I'm curious about that. Wikipedia says it still supports all NPAPI plugins (not just Flash), but I wonder if that's still true. Mozilla has ripped out NPAPI entirely from their codebase.
Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.
> I tend to agree with you but my concerns are that Palemoon took an older version of the engine
If you mean that Pale Moon (two words please) is stuck in Firefox 52, this may be true during the time of the initial fork, but right now, no. A lot of stuff has been backported from newer versions of the Mozilla codebase, such as AV1 support, newer JavaScript features like the nullish coalescing operator (which had been a pain for us in the past in terms of web compatibility, but we have it now since June this year), etc.
> which lacks important features such as multi-process support
52 had e10s; it's just not enabled by default for all users. But we've intentionally removed any support for e10s in our fork of the Mozilla platform, as we believe multi-process is a downgrade in browser security and a spit to decades of systems engineering. You can read the rationale of the lead developer in this forum post: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=17442
Btw, just in case you don't bother reading the link above, this does not mean multithreading is not a thing in Pale Moon. Quite the opposite actually; we want to take advantage of multiple cores by focusing more on utilizing threads, not separate processes which the mainstream players are doing.
> Basilisk seemed to have something a little more modern, but also seems to have stalled over ownership issues.
Basilisk has the same exact platform as Pale Moon, so it's not "more modern". It does have more features enabled such as WebRTC and EME/DRM, which are intentionally disabled in Pale Moon. The Widevine DRM is currently useless however because Google refuses to give us a license for use of their content decryption module, and upgrading our in-tree DRM implementation would require a large and risky rewrite of the media code.
Basilisk has a new owner by the way, and I'm looking forward to having it replace my Firefox ESR for WebRTC.
> If XUL addons are still important, then Waterfox Classic is still around, still gets updates, uses the last ever version of the core engine (not merely the last LTS version) that supports XUL.
56 may look better as a fork point instead of 52 if you look solely at the version number, but it isn't that simple. Otherwise we would've used 56 as well. But there are problems with 56 which prevents us from creating a platform for multiple applications, instead of being Firefox-centric. We also don't want any Rust code in the platform. Which is why 52 was chosen, which has less bustage and less Rust code, making it easier to deal with.
> The Waterfox Project is open that there are security issues in it that they cannot fix and that they don't recommend or promote it because of this. The Palemoon/Basilisk project does not say this, but I am confident that the same issues and more also apply to them.
If you see any bugs in that list (https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox-Classic/wiki/Unpatched-Security-Advisories) that still applies to Pale Moon's platform, it would be appreciated if you report about it (PM Moonchild on the forum if it's a serious security bug). But taking a random bug from there, I could see bug 1558299 already being fixed on our platform for example: https://xref.palemoon.org/goanna-central/source/platform/netwerk/base/nsNetUtil.cpp#1821
Anyway, I'm not here to evangelize and tell y'all to switch to Pale Moon. I know that some will be disappointed; we still don't have support for Google's proprietary extensions to regexp (which would require a wholesale overhaul of our JS engine), for example, nor do we still have support for the Google-centric WebComponents (which changes fundamentally our layout engine). There are also websites which in theory should be perfectly compatible with us, but refuses to do so (most likely due to useragent sniffing). For those websites dependent on those tricks, and workarounds such as the Palefill extension not working, I have Firefox as a backup browser. I believe we should all use the best tool for the job. And most of the time it's Pale Moon for me. :)
Config files?
If you're dumping your users into a text editor to change how your application works, you've already lost.
Firefox is my main browser, but this stuff still annoys me. Just have and advanced option for settings and/or a search settings option. Problem is that designing a config application is boring, so nobody wants to do it.
Re: Config files?
Yes. You should never need to be editing config files by hand in this day and age... If it's necessary to offer that level of configuration, then it can and should be performed on an active screen with instant clarity as to what just happened.
Even the existing config mechanism is less than friendly in that it is less than clear what any particular setting actually does...
Fortunately I rarely need to change anything after first use, and the only add ins I use are ublock origin and noscript, so no great problem.
It'd be nice though if there were an internal mechanism automatically to delete non whitelisted cookies and other tracking agents as soon as a new page is selected to a tab.
Waterfox website made me seasick
[Author here]
What, the rippling background? Really?
Well, one of the addons I like is Readability:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readability-based-reader-view/
It turns off stuff like that. So, another good reason, IMHO.
Plenty of horizontal space?
I use an ultrawide monitor and have browser windows at half that width. Even that seems to be 'narrow' enough for some sites to start collapsing and hiding stuff.
A bookmark hack I swear by but not sure how common it is :-
Is to have different set of bookmark folders based on time
Morning set of tabs with the cartoons,
Evening with the more in depth news (and the Register)...yes I got to these tabs early today
Mid week, weekly, monthly, quarterly etc and 1st Oct, 1st Nov etc for information or events I want to check regularly, this way I don't miss much but don't waste my time randomly checking sites too much either.
I have always been lousy with to do lists, the daily grind that swiftly builds up but this has really helped.
At this point
I'm seriously considering ditching Firefox completely. I spent about an hour this morning trying to get my history, settings, saved passwords and everything else back after Firefox sh@t the bed during a failed update and wouldn't load my profile, forcing me to create a new one. It's ditched my add-ons as well, which is a REAL pain in the posterior.
Re: At this point
[Article author here]
This may be one of the less everyday advantages of Waterfox. Since it is based off the Firefox ESR release, you only get minor updates in routine use, then a bigger one a few times a year.
This is true of Firefox ESR itself, of course, but Waterfox just gives me a little bit less grief.
Re: At this point
Probably too late to help you, but the -allow-downgrade switch normally fixes issues with failed upgrades, or jumping back to an older ESR Version over the current standard version.
[1]https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1287075
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1287075
Palemoon
Several people have mentioned Palemoon. This is still my browser of choice for many things but unfortunately there is an ongoing issue with various buttons (often in popup forms etc) in websites being unresponsive. The Palemoon response seems to be that they are doing the right thing and everyone else is wrong in allowing the button to be pressed. Which seems a little ... arrogant(?).
Re: Palemoon
Following well-known, sane, and mature standards is not arrogance in my opinion. The browser can only do so much, especially if it's being developed by a small team. The correct solution would be for those websites to actually follow the standards and not do some weird stuff with the JavaScript (which is often using draft features pushed by Google. I repeat, DRAFT features). This will not only benefit Pale Moon, but them as well, as it would be easier to maintain. Less is more.
Call me Danny Glover
I'm getting to old for this sh!t. Brave was a good alternative when I started using it, now I read some not so flattering stuff, I always had FF as a backup, and use it regularly for all my 'inside the network stuff' modem GUI, NAS, PI-Hole, switch GUI etc... and should Brave not render or play nicely with a page, I'll give it a try in FF.
Someone wake me when the Browser war is over, and let me know who won?
Thanks!
I still remember Camino!
Thanks
See title.
Been trying to get away from Chrome/Brave/Safari and find something friendlier/more secure for some time. This helped a lot.
Tablet users need not apply
I wish articles like this one would clarify that these benefits apply to desktop Firefox only. They are not available in Firefox for Android and iOS.
And this is so relevant to browser development.
" Brave .... its boss, Brandon Eich, left Mozilla due his controversial backing of legislation against gay marriage."
Fair comment about silently rewriting affiliate links, but is this really relevant to a discussion of browser functionality?
Multirow Tabs Please
I much prefer multirow tabs over vertical ones, but they're getting harder and harder to implement in FF, requiring a new bunch of modifications to userChrome.css which break every few versions.
All this malarky fiddling around in files is a colossal PITA and I curse Mozilla for removing the ability for plugins to control the UI like this.
Lynx still works fine for serious web sites
Just sayin'
Mozilla has not just taken its eyes off the customizability goal of late. They have abandoned it. The new goal is to become Chrome, and to remove every feature Firefox has that Chrome does not. Their excuse is that they all increase the maintenance burden, and it just happens that the ones that are okay to remove are the ones that Chrome doesn't have, since that defines, for them, user expectation.
I am not sure Firefox is the most customizable anymore. I would have to give that to Vivaldi.