browsers

Making Firefox faster (by confronting my bookmark addiction)

I have used Firefox as my primary browser on every platform for about the last hundred years. I’ve dabbled with others:

  • Edge
  • Chrome
  • Vivaldi
  • Brave
  • Opera
  • Safari (on the few platforms it supports)
  • Arc (Mac version)
  • DuckDuckGo
  • Various Firefox forks, like Librewolf and the new Zen Browser

And way back in the olden times I was an Internet Explorer user. I know, I know.

I always come back to Firefox because:

  • It works for me, and I’m comfortable with it.
  • Mozilla is one of the few companies out there with a non-Chromium browser engine and I think it’s important to fight against having a single engine largely controlled and maintained by Google, a company I think is heading in all the wrong directions. Mozilla is also not moving in a direction I like, but lesser of evils and all that (I am keeping an eye on Zen browser, though, more on that in a future post).
  • There always seems to be some feature or design quirk in the other browsers that grates on me, and somehow the things in Firefox that grate do so at a level I’m willing to tolerate.

But recently, Firefox had been getting sluggish–noticeably so. Recent updates had added browser tab previews (which other browsers have and which I enjoy, but consider non-essential). I thought this might be the culprit, so turned it off. No change. I tried clearing out the cookies and cache (the browser equivalent to turning it off and back on). Also no change.

It occurred to me that my bookmarking habit (bookmark everything) had been getting a bit out of control recently. I use a new tab extension called NelliTab. It presents your bookmarks as large icons, lets you re-order them (within their respective folder), and allows you to collapse or hide specific folders. It’s great because I’m a visual person, and it allows me to create a visual grid of bookmarks I can use with muscle memory. But as I mentioned, I have a lot of bookmarks and maybe the extension was getting bogged down.

Reluctantly, I disabled NelliTab and went back to the standard Firefox new tab page, using four rows of sites, pinning the ones I visit the most. And it worked! Firefox is now back to behaving normally.

I may eventually go back to NelliTab and see if a truncated version of the bookmarks (hiding most folders and creating a small list of most-visited ones) may solve the issue there as well. For now, I’m happy to have the browser performing smoothly again. And, you know, sometimes a little change is good, too.

Plus, it shows me the current weather conditions. I don’t need this, but I like it. I am weird.

Hooray for chunky scroll bars!

I saw a post on Mastodon lamenting the current state of scroll bars in computer software, most often in web browsers, but pretty much everywhere they appear. They have become weirdly thin, they’ve lost the navigation up/down arrows, they often disappear when no scrolling is taking place, or they’re completely off by default.

I miss the old days of chunky scroll bars that:

  • Let you know where you are in a document/web page/window
  • Allow you to easily grab the widget to scroll in bigger chunks
  • Had those navigation arrows that let you scroll a little bit with the mouse or arrow keys

My browser of choice, Firefox, uses the in vogue super-thin scroll bars, but this article shows how to make them chunky again. Woo. I repeat the steps here because I found this both useful and delightful and wanted to share it.

How to Get Chunky Scroll Bars in Firefox

  1. In the address bar, enter about:config, then click the button after the scary warning appears
  2. Search for widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override
  3. Edit the number to your desired chunkiness. I find 18 or 20 comes pretty close to what I consider “classic” scroll bar size.
  4. Bonus: Change the shape of the widget by searching for widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style and changing that number. Choosing 4 changes the widget to a classic-style rectangle.

This may go away on future versions of Firefox, and it doesn’t put back the navigation arrows, but it’s still nice to not just have chunky scroll bars back, but actual customizable scroll bars!

DuckDuckGo-Go ~or~ Hey, let’s try yet another browser

UPDATE: I have discovered that DDG has imported a bunch of wrong/old passwords from Firefox, forcing me to copy/paste or—gad—actually remember my passwords. This is a dealbreaker. Off with you, Ducky!

I have been using Firefox for about 500 years, or since it basically launched back in 2004 (while this is 18 years ago, I actually would have guessed Firefox was older still). I have only deviated a few times from it since then:

  • I tried Google Chrome but for reasons I can’t specifically recall now, did not care for it. And this was before I was fully cognizant on how Google is a data-sucking machine.
  • Microsoft Edge. Mainly the Chromium version and it’s not bad, but while it offered some neat tricks (before Microsoft started to lard in more questionable features) it didn’t offer anything compelling enough to get me to switch over full-time.
  • Vivaldi. This is the “tweak to your heart’s content” browser that should be perfect for a tech nerd. And yet, I find its UI utilitarian and off-putting. It looks like something designed in the 90s. I keep it around as a Chromium alternative.
  • Arc. This is currently in beta and Mac-only (a Windows version is due later in 2023) and it really does some new things, mostly by rethinking how tabs should work in a way that I have to admit, I really don’t like. I’m not one of those 100-tab guys, so I’ve never felt having a dozen or so tabs open is a big issue. It feels like Arc is trying to solve a problem I don’t have and feels weirdly confining as a result.
  • Safari. I’ve never really used Safari very much. Every time I do, its UI just grates on me. It has to be different, but not better. Poo on you, Apple.

Today, after reading about DuckDuckGo launching a Windows version of its privacy-focused browser, I decided to give it a shot—on the Mac. It lacks extension support, so this is a good test of how much I rely on extensions for my browsing experience.

In the first few minutes it seems clean and unobtrusive. I’ll report back later if it drives me crazy. I now have six (!) browsers installed on my Mac:

  • Firefox
  • Safari
  • Edge
  • Vivaldi
  • Arc
  • DuckDuckGo

The Arc browser

Image of Arc from The Sweet Setup

I started trying out the Arc browser a few weeks ago (it is currently Mac-only, though a Windows version is expected by year’s end), and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it.

I’ve been using it more, though, because WordPress on my own blog is choking in Firefox. I’ve checked and this appears to be an issue specific to the Mac version of Firefox, so I’m not sure how or if I can fix this.

Unlike other browsers like Vivaldi, which do basically the same stuff as most browsers, but allow for greater customization, Arc tries to do some things differently. For example, there are no tabs. Well, there are, but they are in a sidebar that houses other things, and unless you pin a tab to the top, where it changes to a small icon, it will be gone the next day. All open tabs get purged every night in an attempt to avoid going tab-crazy or something. I imagine this would drive the “100 Chrome tabs open, I don’t care if it’s murdering my computer and draining all resources” people up the wall, probably a deal-breaker. But I am not one of these people.

Still, it feels a bit disjointed to move between the pinned tabs at the top and ones below that look more like vertical tabs. There’s also no way of knowing which tabs are open, other than the pinned tab you are currently looking at will have its icon highlighted. But maybe it doesn’t matter, because you just click an icon and if the tab is already open, it’s there waiting for you. Arc seems designed around removing visual clutter–probably not a bad thing.

You can also “boost” a site, which is a weird way to describe being able to customize a site through a few simple GUI controls that let you alter the fonts, colours and also “zap” elements, in much the way the uBlock Origin extension lets you use a picker to remove items from a page. All of this works well, though the font choices tend toward being fruity and not so practical. I guess they were going for whimsy or something. Speaking of extensions, you can also install any extension from the Chrome web store, since Arc runs on Chromium. I’ve not encountered any issues with the new extensions I’ve tried so far.

There’s lots of other stuff I’ve either not looked at or have only glanced at, so can’t really comment on. You can create “spaces” like some other browsers, making it easy to segregate work and home browsing, for example. You can create easels, which are free-form pages where you can enter text, make basic shapes, add images and then share them, because why not?

As I poke around more, I’ll come back with another post to say whether I’ve become an Arc convert or decided to just put up with the buggy yet familiar Mac version of Firefox. Change is hard, but I give credit to the team behind Arc for trying some genuinely new things with the browser.

These are a few of my favorite (browser extension) things

I use Firefox because Google sucks and I have a soft spot for the underdog, which Firefox very much is in this era of Chromium-or-bust browsers. Also, Apple doesn’t make Safari for Windows (anymore) and I’m sorry, Apple, I don’t use your devices all the time! So Firefox it is.

These are the extensions I use regularly and that I find useful. The list is a lot shorter than it used to be, as browsers began integrating a lot of features that previously required extensions.

  • Pocket. Save web stories to read later. Also converts text to a reader view, which makes the layout look nicer (and kills ads as a bonus side effect). Mozilla (makers of Firefox) owns Pocket, so it is integrated into Firefox, though it’s available for other browsers, too.
  • Font Finder (revived). I am always on the lookout for good fonts because a) I am always thinking about what will look good on my blog b) I have a fascination with fonts and typefaces and c) I’m just kind of weird in that I want to know the name of the font I’m looking at. Font Finder lets you reveal a font on a site with a simple click. You can even select a section of text and get it to render in whatever font you want, which is even more of a niche case usage that I’m looking for.
  • Dark Reader. Does its best to intelligently switch any site over to a dark mode. Handy for glaringly bright websites that don’t offer alternative views for those late night sessions. You can customize the color choices it makes, too, if you don’t like what it comes up with.
  • uBlock Origin. Yes, I block ads. Considering how they have become a vector for malware, tracking, slowing down page loading and breaking up page layout into nonsense, I feel no guilt in blocking ads. I pay for a lot of the sites I read regularly–when the option is present. It usually isn’t.
  • LanguageTool. This is the dullest name for a decent grammar and spell-checking extension ever. Similar to Grammarly, it offers to spell-check on the fly and has a nice single-click UI that please me. Like Grammarly and others, it gates some features behind a subscription, but the free version works well for me. My one complaint is it wants to insert commas everywhere.
  • OneNote Web Clipper. I don’t use OneNote that much anymore, but when I did, this extension worked well in letting you easily clip stuff for later use. Think of it as a more interactive version of Pocket.
  • NelliTab. Replacement for the New Tab page. After I found FVD speed dial started bogging down Firefox (it could take 30 seconds to start up) I sought out alternatives and the nice thing about NelliTab is it uses your bookmarks, so if you later decide to stop using NelliTab you still have your bookmarks all neatly organized into folders. The icons it uses look nice, too, and there’s a host of options for layout to help customize it just so. I may find I eventually bog this down, too, but for now it’s fine.

Important update!

Lying, it’s not important at all.

But I am still using the new Chromium-based Edge, which surprises me. While there are some niggles, there are no showstoppers driving me back to Firefox.

On the other hand, there are a few features of Firefox I miss, but not enough to compel me to go back to it–not yet, anyway.

The funny part is that the only reason I even looked into switching is because Firefox started displaying some squirrely behavior on start-up (it also feels a bit slow to start). Had that never happened, I’d still be using it daily now.

Anyway, a random tech musing. Carry on.

Crazy but true, I am still using Edge

Why am I still using Edge (to be more precise, the new Chromium variant of Edge)? Have I at last gone mad? Did Firefox kick my imaginary dog?

No and no. Well, probably no and no.

I decided to try out other browsers because Firefox was starting to feel a bit sluggish and was exhibiting inconsistent behavior on startup:

  • Pinned Gmail tab stopped loading Gmail. I actually suspect Google is the villain here, as the pinned Gmail tab still works without issue in Edge. Boo, Google. I am still in the process of moving away from Gmail, so this is probably not a knock against Firefox.
  • This very blog is my homepage, as I am a secret narcissist. But most of the time Firefox now refuses to load the page, falling back to a new tab page instead. The behavior seems to be worse in Windows 10 than on a Mac running Catalina.
  • As mentioned already, it starts up quite slow. I figured this was due to the perhaps ironically named extension I use for the new tab page, FVD Speed Dial. But even after disabling it and just having Firefox’s default new tab page load up instead it still takes longer to load. Edge, by comparison, opens in a blink.

A couple of things hinged on me sticking with Edge for more than a day before going back to Firefox, flaws and all:

  1. Consistent behavior on startup.
  2. Faster performance.
  3. No weird issues on any of my usual sites.
  4. I needed to find another new tab page extension to try out in place of FVD Speed Dial.

#1 and #2 have both been fine. #3 has been mostly fine, with a few little quibbles:

  • Some Twitter embeds will not play video. However, I confirmed the same issue in Firefox, so it’s either a problem on Twitter’s end or an issue with an extension I use in both browsers.
  • When downloading my Kobo books, Firefox grabs them properly as epub files (and loads them into Adobe Digital Editions), while Edge grabs them as acsm files, which need to be opened first in Adobe Digital Editions, converted and then moved to my iPad into the superior Marvin ereader app. This is more a minor convenience, as it’s really only one extra step. Still, it’s an extra step and extra steps add up over time into gigantic staircases. Or something.

#4 was the big one. There are lots of new tab extensions out there that offer some variation on bookmarks/speed dials. Some of them are very pretty, some offer unique options, some require a subscription to unlock decent features (boo), but all of them usually lacked in some fundamental way. I like what FVD Speed Dial does–it just offers large thumbnails of sites, lets you divide them into groups (in this case, tabs within the new tab page) and offers robust customizations of the page. I thought about sticking with FVD Speed Dial, but I really wanted to try something else. I did try using the built-in Collections, which actually work reasonably well–except they don’t sync between different machines (despite the toggle existing to allow sync) and this is a deal breaker because I am not manually maintaining two (or more) sets of Collections. UPDATE: Collections suddenly started syncing across computers today, like my post scared the feature into working or something. Weird. This is good, but I still prefer the extension I found, which I mention directly below.

After passing on Collections and nearly giving up, I finally came across Toby, which is a weird name, but a good extension.

The presentation is minimal and tidy. The organization is there, this time with collapsible sections instead of tabs), it’s very fast (it syncs between PC and Mac almost instantly) and it’s simple to drag sites into different groups. It has a few little niggles, but overall, it does pretty much what I want, and the clean look really appeals to me.

Overall, I now have Edge running in a way that works the way I want most of the time. It still has a few annoyances, but surprisingly, it mostly gets out of the way, and is pretty speedy to boot. Having it available on Mac and PC is a plus.

I’m not abandoning Firefox, though. In fact, if Toby were available for Firefox, I might be using it right now (the Toby website erroneously claims it works in Firefox and it’s odd no one has corrected this. I suspect it may exist for the pre-Quantum versions of Firefox, but these are now obsolete).

We’ll see how long I live on the Edge (ho ho), but for now I am content to stick with it.

And have uninstalled Chrome as a result.

I tried Edge again for part of a whole day

I’ve noticed a few glitches in Firefox lately, namely it sometimes doesn’t load my pinned tab on start-up (Gmail) or my default site (this very blog). It also seems less snappy than before. It’s possible these problems are related to extensions. For example, I use FVD Speed Dial to replace the new tab page with a pile o’ thumbnails for websites I frequent. I find this works way better for me than bookmarks because I can use two distinct visual cues to quickly choose the site I want: location of the thumbnail (they don’t shift around) and the actual look of the thumbnail (usually a miniature representation of the site). But I have so many of these that Firefox actually takes what feels like a long time to load up.

So last week I decided to again try Microsoft’s Chromium-based version of Edge. It now has Collections, which are basically parts of or entire sites that you can name and group together. I thought this might make a handy substitute for the speed dials and it actually is pretty nice.

But then, while doing work (actual paid work, as I’m still working from home) I noticed in Footprints (the system we use for managing incidents) it would not link knowledge base articles to tickets, requiring me to either not link (bad) or manually generate the link and paste it in (tedious). I just gave up and stopped using Edge.

There might be a fix for this issue and I can work around it, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m getting tired of fixing things that don’t work for reasons unknown, and workarounds aren’t that great, either. I want things to actually function properly, without a song and dance. I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect all the basics to behave as you’d expect.

So Edge has been kicked to the curb again. It’s too bad, in a way, because it is pretty snappy, and has some unique features (like the aforementioned collections). On the other hand, though Microsoft claims to care about my privacy, they are a giant corporation and while not as loose with ethics as Google (who basically inverted their famous “Don’t be evil” motto), I’m not sure I entirely trust them, either, as ads are definitely a part of their business in a way they aren’t for Mozilla (or Apple, but Safari sucks and it’s not on PC, anyway).

I’ll probably try Edge again at some point, though. The collections idea intrigues me. And the snappiness was nice.

Side note: For some reason have highlighted products in bold, in a wacky throwback to John C. Dvorak’s old columns in PC Magazine.

EDIT: I did try Edge again, just now (the morning after) and in a CBC News story there were big gaps in a story that I assumed were ads being blocked, but no, it was Twitter embeds. I verified that Twitter is the one tracker on the site blocked by default (by Edge), so I set it to allow tracking. It still won’t show tweets. On the one hand, it’s Twitter, so what am I really losing? On the other, if I want to see tweets, it should just work if I say, “Thou shalt allow tweets.” Even the usual routine of clearing cache and cookies, disabling ad blockers, restarting thew browser etc. has no effect. Edge, you stink!

EDIT, The Sequel: I switched over to the Mac mini to do some things and on a lark decided to try Edge because I am a glutton for punishment. Two things:

  • Twitter embeds are working on the CBC News site. Weird, but good.
  • Collections, which are supposed to sync across different systems, do not appear to be syncing, so boo. It may just be syncing slowly, though (hopefully not syncing into the depths to never be seen again).
  • Bonus third thing: I keep trying to spend more time on the Mac, because it’s where my main writing app is, and keep failing because I can never get mice working the way I want. This tasks me as Kirk tasked Khan. I’m hoping I get a better ending (than Khan).

EDIT, The Sequel to the Sequel: Tried a bunch of typical troubleshooting steps to get Collections to appear/sync on the Mac but no go. Alas. It is hard to turn off the li’l troubleshooter in me, but I will try for now.

While I was on the Mac I also tried the Logitech MX 720 mouse again, both on Bluetooth and with the receiver, after doing a firmware update. And it’s still kind of juddery and glitchy instead of smooth, noticeably worse than the Microsoft Sculpt mouse on Bluetooth, so this does appear to be a Logitech thing. Too bad the Sculpt mouse is so basic. Also I feel a bit dirty using a mouse with a dedicated Windows key on a Mac.

I’ll try yet again next week (update: on PC, that is).

On the Edge

Today Microsoft released the new, Chromium-based version of its Edge browser. Chromium is the open standard that Google uses as the basis for Chrome, so while some think that Microsoft has essentially caved in and started using a reskinned version of Chrome, that’s not true. In fact, Microsoft will now have direct influence over the future of Chromium, helping to reduce Google’s oversized leverage.

Chromium Edge also doesn’t include all of Google’s data-collecting services, too–an important distinction.

While I have used Firefox for a hundred years and will use it for a hundred more, long after I’ve become a floating head in a jar, I am interested in seeing what an actual competitive Microsoft browser looks like. I’ve installed it on my PC and will also install it on my MacBook Pro and mini. I’m going to try sticking with it for a solid week to see how it feels vs. what I’m used to in Firefox.

Realistically, I don’t expect to keep using it, but you never know. I’ve previously used Chrome and yes, Internet Explorer, as my main browsers in the past, so I’m open to change.

Here’s a few things I already like (some of these are common features to most browsers, others are more unique):

  • Pinned tabs
  • Pinned sites on the taskbar. I find this more useful than I thought.
  • Reading mode
  • Being able to use Chrome extensions from the Chrome web store (MS’s store is a bit sparse)
  • The pretty backgrounds you can opt to get on the new tab page
  • The new tab page customization options
  • Nice-looking dark mode
  • Generally speedy, though these are early days. Er, hours.

UPDATE: The new tab page only lets you have a maximum of seven “top sites.” This is fantastically dumb and basically a deal breaker for me. I then spent most of the evening looking at other new tab extensions, but they all had features missing or other issues, such as:

  • Ugly as all get-out
  • Kind of skeevy (usually requiring an account)
  • Locking basic functionality behind a monthly subscription (lol)
  • Lacked customization (icon sizes, etc.)
  • Focusing on widgets and other things over presenting a list of sites

I did a search hoping there might be a way to have more than seven top sites on the official new tab page, but my results yielded nothing. I was using Bing, though.