I just tried it out, it's certainly faster which is nice. I've got some usability issues which I've given as feedback. But this seems like a good start.
I just tried it out, it's certainly faster which is nice. I've got some usability issues which I've given as feedback. But this seems like a good start.
I've been using icecat from f-droid and browsing tildes in this new firefox feels really snappy. I'm curious about their "collections" thing. At first I thought that it was just a fancy name for...
I've been using icecat from f-droid and browsing tildes in this new firefox feels really snappy.
I'm curious about their "collections" thing. At first I thought that it was just a fancy name for bookmarks folders, but then I realized that they still have the usual bookmarks. I wonder what's their objective here.
I kinda see what they're doing. Collections of tabs about a specific task that I don't want to lose and still want at hand really end up clogging my phone's browser. And my desktop's browser. And...
I kinda see what they're doing. Collections of tabs about a specific task that I don't want to lose and still want at hand really end up clogging my phone's browser. And my desktop's browser. And something I spend a decent amount of time doing is opening up the same set of tabs to check them all. Collections help with both use cases.
Yeah I understand that, but the usual bookmark feels irrelevant here. Why wouldn't they remove it? This is just from a UI UX point of view, because at its core both collections and bookmarks work...
Yeah I understand that, but the usual bookmark feels irrelevant here. Why wouldn't they remove it? This is just from a UI UX point of view, because at its core both collections and bookmarks work the same way. However one is a lot easier to find than the other.
Why would it need to be removed? People use it. I have more than 6k if them. And they serve way more stuff than just easy access: archival, bookmarklets, search keywords, organisation. I really...
Why would it need to be removed? People use it. I have more than 6k if them. And they serve way more stuff than just easy access: archival, bookmarklets, search keywords, organisation.
I really dislike this tendency to remove features that cost nothing just because someone thinks it is redundant. That you don't have a use for them does not mean others don't, and this sort of backwards incompatible changes screw the user up bad. Don't need them, fine, don't use them.
Sorry, maybe I was not able to express myself correctly. I was not saying that Bookmarks shouldn't exist because the app offers Collections. What I meant is that Collections at its core are...
Sorry, maybe I was not able to express myself correctly. I was not saying that Bookmarks shouldn't exist because the app offers Collections. What I meant is that Collections at its core are Bookmarks (folders). So, from an UI point of view, the user now has two ways of accomplishing the same thing. You have Bookmarks organized into folders, and you have a "general" folder called Bookmarks. But this "general" folder is much harder to reach (3 clicks vs scroll + 1 click), and that for me is bad design.
Same. It seems like they are trying to do in part what OneTab plugin does. If that is the case, I need this on my desktop Firefox as well! Although it does not seem to act like OneTab in the sense...
Same. It seems like they are trying to do in part what OneTab plugin does. If that is the case, I need this on my desktop Firefox as well!
Although it does not seem to act like OneTab in the sense of collecting several tabs at the same time. Unfortunately..
I've seen this feature before, I'm sure it was in early UX design sketches for Gnome Shell or maybe it was some other experimental DE. You could group a bunch of apps and a layout (eg: IDE on...
I've seen this feature before, I'm sure it was in early UX design sketches for Gnome Shell or maybe it was some other experimental DE. You could group a bunch of apps and a layout (eg: IDE on desktop one, browser on two, sftp and terminal on three, mail client on four) into a "Collection" and then just launch that when you wanted to do the thing you needed that particular setup for. It's a nice idea for the desktop but I'm not entirely sure how it adds anything that bookmark folders don't already do.
I don't think it ever made it into Gnome in the end, which is a shame. Might be coming at some point I suppose. It's not like I need more than a browser and a terminal these days anyway (btw...
I don't think it ever made it into Gnome in the end, which is a shame. Might be coming at some point I suppose. It's not like I need more than a browser and a terminal these days anyway (btw everyone on linux should check out Tilda for a pull-down Quake Console style always running terminal app)
I have to this day failed to understand what activities really do. Is there a write up or demo that you (or anyone else) know of that can teach me about them?
I have to this day failed to understand what activities really do. Is there a write up or demo that you (or anyone else) know of that can teach me about them?
This blog post seems to summarise it fairly well: http://takingnothingforgranted.com/introduction-kde-virtual-desktops-activities/ One huge advantage for me is that you can stop individual...
One huge advantage for me is that you can stop individual Activities and with that clean up your resources. Then you can start them again and should pick up where you left it.
Happy to answer more later, I'm on mobile right now.
That was useful, thanks! So I imagine I could have one default activity with Emacs and Firefox, then another one with Zotero, Emacs and a PDF viewer for reading stuff, etc., and selecting one...
That was useful, thanks!
So I imagine I could have one default activity with Emacs and Firefox, then another one with Zotero, Emacs and a PDF viewer for reading stuff, etc., and selecting one would start up the apps if needed and maybe save the particular window layout? That could be useful to me I imagine, I will give it a try.
Yup. What I also sometimes do is to open activities for different projects. So e.g. I have Project A activity where I have a terminal, Kate with a session dedicated to that project, a file widget...
Yup. What I also sometimes do is to open activities for different projects. So e.g. I have Project A activity where I have a terminal, Kate with a session dedicated to that project, a file widget on the desktop with the folder open that is relevant, several PDFs open that I need etc. And when I suspend that activity and re-start it later, I know things are exactly where I left them.
Also super useful as a dedicated presentation activity to have special power settings for it (or video, gamning etc.)
Sounds cool! If I don't overwhelm you with questions, could I ask one last one? How do you reproduce your setup, and do you somehow version control it? To this day I haven't been able to nicely...
Sounds cool! If I don't overwhelm you with questions, could I ask one last one? How do you reproduce your setup, and do you somehow version control it? To this day I haven't been able to nicely reproduce my setup with any DE, be it KDE, Gnome or XFCE, which is one of the main reasons I stick to i3wm (the other being that everything else is moving to Wayland and I don't want to deal with it just yet). Every time I reinstall the OS, with most of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME intact, the setup is at least slightly different. With my own config, once reinstallation process finishes, I just can continue from where I left, everything is totally the same. A big problem with KDE for me is that *rc under ~/.config store both state and configuration, against what standards dictate, and thus I can't effectively version control them.
No problem, happy to spread the good word :) What I do is simply rely on my backups. I have Borg set up to daily backup my whole home directory, including all dot/config files, and just excluding...
No problem, happy to spread the good word :)
What I do is simply rely on my backups. I have Borg set up to daily backup my whole home directory, including all dot/config files, and just excluding temporary files, download folders etc. So if anything goes wrong, I just pull it from there.
I agree though that storing the state and configuration stored in the same folders or even files is a big annoyance with KDE that I have as well. AFAIK it’s being worked on, but it’s not an easy nut to crack, with all the legacy that needs to be taken into account.
But back to the question of how to store and restore Plasma settings, I hear people like the Plasma Configuration Saver widget a lot for that use. I haven’t taken it for a spin yet myself, but looks very promising.
Don’t forget that for just look and feel, KDE Plasma already includes a built-in feature (again) to load, save, and share whole theme packages, called Look and Feel. It’s the first thing you see if you open up System Settings ↦ Workspace Theme.
Been using Firefox for Android for years now, so I'm looking forward to this. But, something has to be done about the address bar on the bottom. It's always present, even as I type this. It should...
Been using Firefox for Android for years now, so I'm looking forward to this.
But, something has to be done about the address bar on the bottom. It's always present, even as I type this. It should autohide or have an option to put it up top.
The UI is a bit weird but I don't hate it. I've been meaning to switch to Firefox from Brave now that I VPN my mobile traffic through my Pi-Hole at home so I guess this is a good time for it.
The UI is a bit weird but I don't hate it. I've been meaning to switch to Firefox from Brave now that I VPN my mobile traffic through my Pi-Hole at home so I guess this is a good time for it.
I really appreciate how much smoother the experience is than current Firefox, but the UI feels worse. The URL bar is kind of in the way since it doesn't disappear, and the 'trey' seems to be...
I really appreciate how much smoother the experience is than current Firefox, but the UI feels worse. The URL bar is kind of in the way since it doesn't disappear, and the 'trey' seems to be mostly useless. I keep swiping it up by accident and it only contains share and bookmark, which is and should be in the menu respectfully. Except when reader mode is available, but that doesn't make sense either - why hide that functionality on the device which I am most likely to use it on?
I like just about everything else, except there is a glaring lack of extensions. Please don't make me browse the ad-infested web.
I tried it out and tracked some issues on it for a while. It's really nice. I wouldn't say it's quite usable as a daily driver yet, but it's close. On my Note 9 it had a few major issues like...
I tried it out and tracked some issues on it for a while. It's really nice. I wouldn't say it's quite usable as a daily driver yet, but it's close. On my Note 9 it had a few major issues like consistently crashing when changing to a different open tab and then attempting to navigate to another page with the address bar, and LastPass wasn't working with it yet, but other than that it was a very slick experience. I look forward to its release.
(…) In order to have a strong foundation for the next generation of mobile Firefox browsers and put all our efforts and resources in GeckoView, work on Firefox Focus will currently be on hold. (…)
Version 1.0.0 has finally released and is available on the Play Store.
Why is it not available on f-droid?
They're working on it. You can follow this issue for updates.
Probably because the Fdroid people haven't got around to it or don't feel like it would be my guess
Aren't the only non-free parts of Firefox the icons/buttons/other branding? I'm sure it's something like that.
Fennec is still in the F-Droid repos, is that not vanilla Firefox without the nonfree bits?
I just tried it out, it's certainly faster which is nice. I've got some usability issues which I've given as feedback. But this seems like a good start.
They posted some more info about GeckoView (Firefox's renderer as an Android library) on the Mozilla Hacks blog today as well: GeckoView in 2019
I've been using icecat from f-droid and browsing tildes in this new firefox feels really snappy.
I'm curious about their "collections" thing. At first I thought that it was just a fancy name for bookmarks folders, but then I realized that they still have the usual bookmarks. I wonder what's their objective here.
I kinda see what they're doing. Collections of tabs about a specific task that I don't want to lose and still want at hand really end up clogging my phone's browser. And my desktop's browser. And something I spend a decent amount of time doing is opening up the same set of tabs to check them all. Collections help with both use cases.
Yeah I understand that, but the usual bookmark feels irrelevant here. Why wouldn't they remove it? This is just from a UI UX point of view, because at its core both collections and bookmarks work the same way. However one is a lot easier to find than the other.
Why would it need to be removed? People use it. I have more than 6k if them. And they serve way more stuff than just easy access: archival, bookmarklets, search keywords, organisation.
I really dislike this tendency to remove features that cost nothing just because someone thinks it is redundant. That you don't have a use for them does not mean others don't, and this sort of backwards incompatible changes screw the user up bad. Don't need them, fine, don't use them.
Sorry, maybe I was not able to express myself correctly. I was not saying that Bookmarks shouldn't exist because the app offers Collections. What I meant is that Collections at its core are Bookmarks (folders). So, from an UI point of view, the user now has two ways of accomplishing the same thing. You have Bookmarks organized into folders, and you have a "general" folder called Bookmarks. But this "general" folder is much harder to reach (3 clicks vs scroll + 1 click), and that for me is bad design.
EDIT: punctuation.
Same. It seems like they are trying to do in part what OneTab plugin does. If that is the case, I need this on my desktop Firefox as well!
Although it does not seem to act like OneTab in the sense of collecting several tabs at the same time. Unfortunately..
I've seen this feature before, I'm sure it was in early UX design sketches for Gnome Shell or maybe it was some other experimental DE. You could group a bunch of apps and a layout (eg: IDE on desktop one, browser on two, sftp and terminal on three, mail client on four) into a "Collection" and then just launch that when you wanted to do the thing you needed that particular setup for. It's a nice idea for the desktop but I'm not entirely sure how it adds anything that bookmark folders don't already do.
KDE Plasma does something similar (and more) with its Activities, yeah. A feature I heavily rely on.
I don't think it ever made it into Gnome in the end, which is a shame. Might be coming at some point I suppose. It's not like I need more than a browser and a terminal these days anyway (btw everyone on linux should check out Tilda for a pull-down Quake Console style always running terminal app)
Yakuake is another good one of such kind.
I have to this day failed to understand what activities really do. Is there a write up or demo that you (or anyone else) know of that can teach me about them?
This blog post seems to summarise it fairly well: http://takingnothingforgranted.com/introduction-kde-virtual-desktops-activities/
One huge advantage for me is that you can stop individual Activities and with that clean up your resources. Then you can start them again and should pick up where you left it.
Happy to answer more later, I'm on mobile right now.
That was useful, thanks!
So I imagine I could have one default activity with Emacs and Firefox, then another one with Zotero, Emacs and a PDF viewer for reading stuff, etc., and selecting one would start up the apps if needed and maybe save the particular window layout? That could be useful to me I imagine, I will give it a try.
Yup. What I also sometimes do is to open activities for different projects. So e.g. I have Project A activity where I have a terminal, Kate with a session dedicated to that project, a file widget on the desktop with the folder open that is relevant, several PDFs open that I need etc. And when I suspend that activity and re-start it later, I know things are exactly where I left them.
Also super useful as a dedicated presentation activity to have special power settings for it (or video, gamning etc.)
Sounds cool! If I don't overwhelm you with questions, could I ask one last one? How do you reproduce your setup, and do you somehow version control it? To this day I haven't been able to nicely reproduce my setup with any DE, be it KDE, Gnome or XFCE, which is one of the main reasons I stick to i3wm (the other being that everything else is moving to Wayland and I don't want to deal with it just yet). Every time I reinstall the OS, with most of
$XDG_CONFIG_HOMEintact, the setup is at least slightly different. With my own config, once reinstallation process finishes, I just can continue from where I left, everything is totally the same. A big problem with KDE for me is that*rcunder~/.configstore both state and configuration, against what standards dictate, and thus I can't effectively version control them.No problem, happy to spread the good word :)
What I do is simply rely on my backups. I have Borg set up to daily backup my whole home directory, including all dot/config files, and just excluding temporary files, download folders etc. So if anything goes wrong, I just pull it from there.
I agree though that storing the state and configuration stored in the same folders or even files is a big annoyance with KDE that I have as well. AFAIK it’s being worked on, but it’s not an easy nut to crack, with all the legacy that needs to be taken into account.
But back to the question of how to store and restore Plasma settings, I hear people like the Plasma Configuration Saver widget a lot for that use. I haven’t taken it for a spin yet myself, but looks very promising.
Don’t forget that for just look and feel, KDE Plasma already includes a built-in feature (again) to load, save, and share whole theme packages, called Look and Feel. It’s the first thing you see if you open up System Settings ↦ Workspace Theme.
Thanks a lot! Lots of useful information in there!
Been using Firefox for Android for years now, so I'm looking forward to this.
But, something has to be done about the address bar on the bottom. It's always present, even as I type this. It should autohide or have an option to put it up top.
It's a huge improvement on the older version of Firefox and it finally supports Bitwarden's autofill accessibility service.
The UI is a bit weird but I don't hate it. I've been meaning to switch to Firefox from Brave now that I VPN my mobile traffic through my Pi-Hole at home so I guess this is a good time for it.
I really appreciate how much smoother the experience is than current Firefox, but the UI feels worse. The URL bar is kind of in the way since it doesn't disappear, and the 'trey' seems to be mostly useless. I keep swiping it up by accident and it only contains share and bookmark, which is and should be in the menu respectfully. Except when reader mode is available, but that doesn't make sense either - why hide that functionality on the device which I am most likely to use it on?
I like just about everything else, except there is a glaring lack of extensions. Please don't make me browse the ad-infested web.
I tried it out and tracked some issues on it for a while. It's really nice. I wouldn't say it's quite usable as a daily driver yet, but it's close. On my Note 9 it had a few major issues like consistently crashing when changing to a different open tab and then attempting to navigate to another page with the address bar, and LastPass wasn't working with it yet, but other than that it was a very slick experience. I look forward to its release.
Looking good so far! Still missing ad blocking and password management until I can start using it as my daily browser.
Oh bother!
Why do you say that?
Because I like Firefox Focus, and the news that the development is put on hold makes me sad.