It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox

Technology@lemmy.world – 2056 points – 11 months ago

• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla's focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google's ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.

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I love firefox so much, but at times, I also am ready to ditch it. Some default configurations are just nothing but stupid. E.g.: all ports above 1024 are by default blocked, even with local domains in your LAN. Or, just happened today: ftp is generally blocked. I then had to switch to Chromium to get a file. Or: if on Linux, many video codecs are not by default bundled. Reasons like that make me hate Firefox. But I hate everything else a bit more.

So is there a browser based on Firefox but without strict configs?

That's really strange, I haven't encountered either of those problems. The latter you can blame your distro for. If Firefox was bundled with all of the codecs it would be really big for no reason, and it would be redundant on nearly every system.

Kinda agree, sure it is also a distro issue. Chromium-like browsers worked out of the box, though. In the end, the user should not really experience easy-to-fix problems like „I can‘t watch any Twitch streams“, and I‘m not really on a uncommon distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Edit: About the blocked ports, check the following variable in your about:config

network.security.ports.banned.override

This one needs to be set, if you would like to use ports, such as 8080.

I recommend that you can play to the OpenSUSE forums.

Neither network.security.ports.banned nor network.security.ports.banned.override are defined by default in Firefox so I suspect the distro set them for you. Same for FTP. And I've never had any issues playing Twitch streams.

Generally curious how that would work. So how/why should a distro do that?

The port issue is a common one if you google it and I even had it in windows. The variable is empty because you set the exceptions there. No value = all ports are blocked.

I don't know why distro maintainers do what they do, but they can use policies or autoconfig to set non-standard default values. It's commonly used to set the distro homepage as the default page when you open Firefox but I guess some distros take that a bit further.

As you can see from some of the other replies many of us don't have those config options by default, and according to the Mozilla Knowledge Base these options are not set by default in Firefox: "This preference does not exist by default."

Thanks for elaborating, this is really much appreciated.

all ports above 1024 are by default blocked

Not on localhost at least no it isn't.

And why the hell would you be using ftp in currentyear. Newsflash: They also ditched gopher.

Never came across a video on the modern web that firefox couldn't play. Everything post-flash should really be fine.

What actually annoys me about all browsers are the policies around loading certain stuff from file://. Try getting something wasm to run without serving the thing from a web server or, *shudder*, base64-encoding bitcode into html. I understand there's some valid gripes around ../ and softlinks and whatnot but, wait, hear me out: What about zipping everything up and calling it a webapp, treat the file as a domain.

Oh it was never my intention to use it, but I was playing a bit with OpenAL and HRTF and ended up on a webpage that actually was using FTP to provide some audio files. So I kinda had no other choice.

The video thing is actually a known issue, but might be due to OpenSUSE not providing codecs by default. I still wonder why Chromium was working, though.