recently i have read a few articles about improved or added features in firefox. the first one that popped up for me today was firefox monitor. monitor uses data provided by have i been pwned to provide a report of any email, data or password breaches your account may have been subject to. i had previously run my email through have i been pwned so i can verify that the info provided was the same. if i am reading the page correctly (i checked while signed in), you don’t even have to have a firefox account to check.
checking that out reminded me of another feature i had read about called firefox send. this one i haven’t used yet, but it seems like a useful feature. according to the link it allows sharing files of up to 1 gb (2.5 gb for a signed in account) with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires.
the last one occurred to me when i stopped by a news site to read an article and some nice older woman who feels no pain was yelling at me (not really, but it was loud) because the video and audio auto-started before the page even finished loading. the last link below explains that starting with firefox 66 (along with many other changes) auto-playing audio will now be muted.
Thanks for the share of this. I must admit I lost faith in Firefox after version 2 and yes I was one of the millions who got it into the record books for the most downloads. I have tried other variants since then, like waterfox and Cyberfox. I have tried it in Mint and to be honest still don’t like it. However I do like these features you have highlighted here, so just maybe I will take another look at it sometime on my workstation not on my main to test them out.
i ran across an article about waterfox just a couple weeks ago and decided to give it a look. with very minimal testing i found it to load a bit quicker on my system. i also thought it was cool that it is portable.
i was wondering yesterday when i posted this and your response gave me the reminder to check. i was able to use both the monitor and send functions just through the url with both chromium and falkon so it seems those are more just web services and not attached to firefox itself which i think is also kinda neat.
i’d be interested in hearing what was disappointing for you about firefox 2. i started using it over a decade ago, but there were good stretches in there where i didn’t have internet access so i may have missed something. i remember a year or so ago there was a flap about firefox installing a mr. robot (from the tv show) add-on with a certain release. that caused some consternation because it wasn’t clear at first that firefox had installed it and people were concerned that it might be malware.
Version two was fine, but from then on, the upgrades kept coming too quickly and they didn’t seem to have been done with as much care as before, because no sooner had you got one you got another. Also a lot of the themes seemed to go, I liked the blue cats red flavour theme and while there was a work around for awhile even that was squashed. It seemed to me that it became just like any other browser and not the fun one it was to start off with. I have also tried Palemoon which is based on it and didn’t like it. Sadly Cyberfox which was the best of the FF alternatives (IMHO) has stopped, it was like firefox used to be. So to sum up, Firefox has become in my mind just another browser and that is such a shame as I miss my cat theme
I also got fed up the constant updates with Firefox. I got so tired of it that I switch my Firefox to the scr (corporation) version b/c it was long term releases. It was then that I also d/l’ ed Chrome and started using it.
Tuning note on Firefox that I ran across for SSD. Could have a large impact on small SSD.
Firefox saves your session to disk every 15 seconds by default. To change: On a new tab type ‘Blank:config’ w/o the quotes. Check the risk box. Search 15000. Then find, browser.sessionstore.interval. Doing a right click on that line lets you change the value. I set mine to 300000. Save session every 5 minutes, instead of 15 seconds. Of course, you can set the value higher or lower. The guy who wrote the article said he set his to every 30 minutes.
a while back i found out firefox was (villanously?) offering DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) so i decided to give it a try. after maybe a month or so of using it, i don’t notice any kind of slowdown at all in page name resolution. i feel like it is a good complement to eff’s HTTPS Everywhere add-on.
more recently they launced a beta run (united states only according to a couple of articles) of Firefox Private Network which adds a layer of address as well as data encryption. it is (i think) more accurately described as a proxy service than a vpn by the first article link. this one does slow things down a bit and i have to switch it off for real-time info sites like netflix (sometimes i can get a good enough connection to watch, but usually not) and youtube.
FireFox has just been updated - I don’t know if this solves the problem that you noticed or not. I don’t use it. I know that if you use VPN in Opera it slows things down, so it could just be the bounce they use to get to the sites you want
i see a new version in my --upgradables as you suggested, but i wasn’t really trying to say the slowdown was a problem. i haven’t used vpn’s much, but realize bouncing internet traffic through proxies can slow things down compared to the usual point-to-point(ish) method like you mentioned. i was moreso trying to let anyone who might be interested in the beta (or possible future full release) that the slowdown might be there if they do
That will always be the case with free proxies/VPNs, because they are part of a vicious circle. The more bandwidth it has, the more will it be used in part by people abusing it. Some people who do unapproved stuff on the internet can’t rely on a paid VPN when you have to deanonymize yourself and the others are simply millions from India, etc. where they don’t even pay a buck for a service because they either can’t or don’t want to.
So unfortunately, if you want a fast VPN, then you have to pay for it, currently. There is no reliable way to get a fast and free proxy. Even the unreliable ways are pretty narrow and with a lot of hiccups.
