this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 83 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] chris@l.roofo.cc 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

power user enough to need vertical tabs

More like I can't ever manage my own tabs so they keep piling up 😭

[–] clb92@feddit.dk 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If I stacked all my tabs vertically, they'd surely topple over and injure someone really badly.

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

[–] AVengefulAxolotl@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 4 points 1 year ago

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!!! 🤯)

[–] GroteStreet@aussie.zone 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Other than desktop pwa, what features do the other browsers have that aren't available as a Firefox plugin?

[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Profile switching is a big one for me.

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?

but I would like to at least have the option for H.265 support.

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?

[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, mobile. That's not a platform I use often. I'll defer to you on that!

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.

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

HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.

HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users' computer

HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.

Hooray for Windows users, I guess.

[–] ugo@feddit.it 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What does profile switching do better than tab containers?

[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] adihex@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Firefox has a profile manager right?

[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On desktop yes but not mobile.

[–] starman@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago

There is a plugin for PWAs too