this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Nice to see it's getting on with the times, it feels like they do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes, which is impressive, the web is a monster (math functions in CSS???), but user facing features have been kinda left in the dust for a long time now, like the highly requested vertical tabs, or desktop PWAs for instance.
I hope they'll make it more feature rich in the future, I still swear by it, but it's a pity seeing all these other browsers with shiny new features I can't ever use
Isn't there an addon for vertical tabs? I mean if you are power user enough to need vertical tabs you should be power user enough to install an addon.
I do use them in fact, but it's a little clunky and not as well integrated as it could be, just like the translations that they're adding in, I've already installed the addon they released before, but nothing beats having essential features built-in following the same UX as the rest of the browser and having centralized, easy to search for settings.
More like I can't ever manage my own tabs so they keep piling up 😭
Me too, and that's why I don't use vertical tabs! If I stacked all my tabs vertically, they'd surely topple over and injure someone really badly.
For real though, I just couldn't seem to get used to vertical tabs last time I tried them.
Hahah, maybe that can work as an incentive to keep fewer then.
But yeah, I find them very useful exactly because I have too many to comfortably see in the tob bar, this way I can treat them like some sort of file tree because at this point my tabs are a second bookmark list, with the bonus of child tabs for extra keeping track of how I got myself in a rabbit hole
Hmm, to me sidebery with the v5 update literally feels like as if it was native, it takes the current theme of your firefox. With custom CSS I remove the top bar as well and it looks awesome.
Oh my, I still hadn't updated my sidebery since I use the PC with it less, gotta say at first glace it looks amazing! Thanks for letting me know
(The new tab button!!! 🤯)
TreeStyle tabs is my favorite addon.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
Other than desktop pwa, what features do the other browsers have that aren't available as a Firefox plugin?
Profile switching is a big one for me.
Also kind of nitpicky on my end, but I would like to at least have the option for H.265 support. I know they can't include it OOTB, but I can't even buy a license compatible with FF.
You can change profiles by going to
about:profiles. I find the way it's implemented in Firefox preferable to other browsers but I can see why others wouldn't.You can also start up the profile switcher when you launch Firefox when launching it from the command-line with
firefox -p.Is this what you were talking about, or were you referring to something different?
Google Chrome only recently implemented this via hardware decoding. I imagine it's possible for Firefox to do the same thing without infringing on patents, as the browser doesn't implement a decoder this way; rather, they use the decoder implemented by NVIDIA et al.
I can only laugh when I consider Google announced they were dropping H.264 support 12 years ago: https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html
H.264 support only exists in Firefox by the grace of Cisco. Out of curiosity, why are you interested in H.265 support?
The profile manager isn't available on mobile, at least I couldn't find it or switch accounts without completely signing out. Checks all the boxes for me on desktop though.
I travel a lot for work and stream Plex. All my media is in HEVC and I dont want to have to buy a video card for the server just so I can transcode it to Firefox when everything else can play HEVC out of the box.
Oh, mobile. That's not a platform I use often. I'll defer to you on that!
As far as I know, Google Chrome did not support HEVC until last year. Safari is still the only browser with a software decoder for HEVC, but I'm pretty sure it was the only one with any form of decoding support for HEVC until 2022. Let me check caniuse!
https://caniuse.com/hevc
So, it seems Samsung Internet (a browser I've never heard of, but presumably is the default on Samsung devices) also supported HEVC decoding for a long time, but aside from that, even hardware decoding support in Chrome is super recent: https://bitmovin.com/google-adds-hevc-support-chrome/
I was going to make a snarky comment about VP9 being good enough for Sisvel since they're trying to chase down Google for patent infringement royalties on HEVC, but yeah, transcoding all that media does not sound fun.
But on the other hand, a bug triager for Mozilla opened a new ticket for HEVC support 3 months ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842838
It's a strange ticket. No description at all, and why would they care about bugs for a video codec they don't support? It suggests Mozilla is going to do...something with HEVC sometime in the future. Shrug.
Edit: Did some more digging. See this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1853448
Hooray for Windows users, I guess.
What does profile switching do better than tab containers?
Syncing 2 different sets of extensions, bookmarks and browsing history across devices reliably. I wish it did work, I hate running Edge on Linux. Even regular Firefox profile sync is kinda flaky for me though.
Firefox has a profile manager right?
On desktop yes but not mobile.
Oh ok
There is a plugin for PWAs too