Firefox has finally upgraded for me to the localhost version and apparently the developers (or rather some other “creative” people, I suspect) decided to make it more secure by being unusable.
The first thing I noticed is that the last tab refused to close and now you need to close the window—that’s annoying. Then I noticed that bookmarks have disappeared from the toolbar and no matter what you do you can only get an additional blank space shown—at least they’re still accessible through the menu. Then I noticed that downloads may run but they’re not reported—now that’s extremely annoying. And cherry on the top is that closed tabs cannot be restored and recent history remains blank—now that’s borderline unusable.
And apparently the reason is that I’m using the browser wrong. From what I read, they decided to “protect” user data by introducing a session password which you apparently need to enter at the each session start. And considering that I power off (most of) my computers at night and usually launch browser for a quick private session (usually to check news or search for something and not clutter my history with URLs from the search pages and bad results) that means unwanted annoyance many times a day. And of course since I had no reason to launch the browser in non-private mode for many months, the change went completely unnoticed (and when they got rid of XUL even I knew that in advance despite not following the news that much).
Unrequested changes (like changing GUI layout, adding Pocket and so on) build up annoyance and breaking things like this make me consider using another browser. For now I see no real alternative (maybe one of its forks is good without me knowing it, or Servo or Ladybird will become usable for my needs), so I simply downgraded to version 126 for time being and switched off auto-updating but I should use dillo and elinks more.
P.S. One of the reasons why I switched to my own video player was that the previous one I used also decided to “improve” user experience in suspiciously similar ways (by not doing what it did because you apparently don’t know what you’re doing and by interpreting things differently). I definitely don’t want to get into browser development (and I lack hardware for that too) but I need to consider that option…
Opera and mpv still works fine.
I replaced firefox because it randomly would hang single open tab, and would start spinning disk for no reason whatever. Also it now have splash welcome screens (for kids maybe?) and that are not-appealing for higher than average intelligence user.
Opera (or Vivaldi, or Brave) is Chromium in disguise, so I’ll pass. And guess what multimedia player I mentioned in the post of getting annoying in the same way as Firefox (I have not seen welcome screens in either but it might be just my luck).
And here’s an unrelated Shaw’s Principle: make a system any idiot can use and only an idiot would want to use it.
This sounds really bizarre. What is the UI for this “session password”, can you describe it? (And what is “localhost version”?) I’ve never heard of any of your symptoms, and my Firefox experience doesn’t match yours at all.
I have bookmarks. Closing the last tab, Firefox quits. Closed tabs can be re-opened including in private mode.
Localhost IP address can be expressed as 127.0.0.1 or 127.0.1. I hope you can recognize the latter number as being the same as some product version.
As for the bug itself, I meant the browser prompt to set primary password – introduced in Firefox 127 and never shown to me (probably because I use the browser in the way described in the post) but after effects associated with it (bookmarks disappearing, last tab refusing to close and so on) remained. Considering that setting such primary password was detrimental for me (having it means also having to type it time from time, in the worst case several times per day when I start browser – hence calling it a session password), I decided to roll back to version 126 instead and have not regretted my decision (even if I have to tell it shut up about upgrades available every day).
It’s fine if it works for you, the problem is that it may stop doing so because of their newly-introduced feature to the point you start considering switching a browser entirely.
firefox gets worse. but no alternatives. and chrome*m is bad
firefox is still so bloated. and despite people telling firefox since it started that people like to have open 200 tabs, they refuse to help people with 200 tabs. well they added ‘search tabs’ which is kinda working. and even now “ability to detect duplicate tabs” lololol. fine i’ll use that why not.
maybe problem is that eyephone app developers took over company. eyephone is for stupid users. and the eyephone firefox app cant even block ads. the app is stupid for stupid users. the developers think the desktop version is for stupid users too.
the original opera codebase , based on presto? engine was really nice. well not nice, and full of bugs, but you could quickly use it to access the www web. you could disable/enable javascript, images, animated gif, sounds, movies… with a keypress and a click. entire browser could be controlled via keyboard (like a certain mplayer). but then opera company forked itself and fucked off.
“we can make chrome better” no you cant. chrome is garbage. is it because google tried to make it into an OS?
The main problem is that the development of both Chromium and Firefox is driven by Baidu business interests (which may coincide with user interests but not so often) – and Safari development is not driven at all.
As the result Mozilla does not care about Firefox development much, especially about non-profitable features. And maintaining a fork means wasting most of your time on staying up to date with the new features introduced in Chromium and used on crucial sites (so if you don’t support them your users can’t use your browser for the most popular sites and thus no appeal to the majority of them) so most of the alternative browsers end up bundling their own ads and other dubious offerings (let’s see if Ladybird will manage to break the curse).
ladybird: Written in C++, Swift
well i’m hopeful anyhow.