lobsters score: 1 · tags: browsers, release
This means they brought it back. Firefox used to have RSS support, untill Mozilla removed it in another of those inexcusably bad decisions.
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Sort of. Live Bookmarks weren’t nearly as pleasant to use with a lot of subscriptions as the Google Reader style UI that has been near-universally adopted by feed readers since.
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I think the key is feed awareness. Browser support for feeds helps with that. Browsers should make it quite visible when you visit pages with feeds. Then you should be able to decide how to use the feeds; whether built-in browser tools, like live bookmarks, or more powerful services.
And once people start using feeds more, they will demand more feeds and better tools to use them.
(And then there’s one reason less for people to use proprietary social networks- I suspect that getting updates from entities is a major use case!)
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Yep, you had “live bookmarks”; if you bookmarked a site that had an RSS feed, the feed items would show up as items in a submenu.
Browser-integrated RSS is one of the “desperate last bullet” to improve things in the web. However, I think nowadays we live in a world where most people have multiple devices, so IMHO besides browser-integrated OOB feed readers, we need those to have some synchronization capabilities. I started writing the idea here, but as I’ve been obsessing over this lately, I decided to write something.
Also I was going to comment about how the Gemini protocol has a fascinating take on feeds, but I also write that frequently, so I wrote another thing.
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Live Bookmarks is the same thing they’ve (re)added here. Sadly it seems like syncing right now doesn’t work with Live Bookmarks via Firefox Sync, as it just syncs them over as empty folders. I’m curious if they’ll be able to fully implement sync on it in the coming releases.
That said, they’ve implemented a reader view on top of it, which I’m a fan of.
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If (hypothetical) you are living in the Darwin land, NetNewsWire is able to synchronise everything on top of iCloud, with E2EE. It’s also possible to use miniflux as the backend.
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I am not, but thanks :)
I actually use self-host Miniflux. I like their simple web app well enough to not need anything else.
And yeah, Apple-ecosystem apps that use iCloud as storage are the seed of my recent ideas about synchronization in apps. I won’t go Apple, but that mostly every Apple user has “guaranteed” remote storage because iCloud is a requirement is a very interesting thing. Unfortunately you don’t really get a choice, but I guess that with E2EE encryption it really doesn’t matter so much. I still wish there was a way for apps to use remote storage with open choices.
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WebDAV is a standard storage interface like you want, but it’s pretty crufty and people don’t like using it. I’m pretty sure some Firefox extensions are able to sync their data or at least their settings through the Firefox Sync mechanism, but read/unread and starred article lists for a feed reader might be too much.
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WebDAV is a standard storage interface like you want, but it’s pretty crufty and people don’t like using it.
Yes, but IIRC it delegates authentication to the web server, and I don’t think there really are any implementations to share specific folders to a specific application.
I’m pretty sure some Firefox extensions are able to sync their data or at least their settings through the Firefox Sync mechanism, but read/unread and starred article lists for a feed reader might be too much.
Heh, Firefox Sync is great. Except that even my tiny 27.4kb NoScript configuration can’t be synchronized over it. It actually works automatically for all extensions, by the way. It’s pretty neat, but it covers very few use cases and the stringent storage limitations make it even of narrower use.
And Firefox Sync is the perfect example where my proposal would help. Mozilla could opt not to provide a service, and just allow people to synchronize their data over whatever cloud storage they wanted. (They could even provide very limited cloud storage themselves.)
edit:
rclone serve s3would be an interesting chunk of a way to implement this. However, unfortunately rclone seems to be headed in a direction I’m not a huge fan of :(
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Waterfox has been my default Linux browser since Firefox 57, 9 years ago. That was the first “Firefox Quantum” release, which broke XUL extensions. I had about 32 and afterwards only 3 worked, and they were the least important.
Waterfox kept XUL for years, so I switched. I installed the Classic Extensions Archive and they all started working again, so I had vertical tabs, merged with a vertical bookmarks bar, automatically synched and deduplicated with Xmarks, parallel multithreaded downloads with resumption of failed downloads, and loads more besides.
Eventually, Webextensions caught up, and Waterfox moved to the bases of Firefox ESR. The old pre-Electron one became Waterfox Classic, and was maintained until 2022.
Waterfox works with global menu bars, as in Unity, Xfce, and KDE. It has built-in adblocking, built-in vertical tab bars a year or more before Firefox, it does no telemetry so it was immune to the Foxstuck outage, and it updates less often than Mozilla’s hectic biweekly schedule.
I have recommended it before:
https://lobste.rs/s/yyxyjy/15_years_forking_waterfox#c_llbl9a
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Thank you for sharing your experience. I went through a “I need a decent browser” phase and wanted to move from firefox, but I’m using Firefox to write this message and I guess that says it all. Of course firefox is great and all, but I find it behaves more and more like these Sillicon valley companies, with lots of popups, even ads and huge pushes for me to use AI here and there.
I can’t remember why I decided against Waterfox. One of my concerns is my ability to keep it updated. I’m not one for strong discipline in keeping AUR packages updated, and there are no official waterfox packages for Arch. To top things off, AUR packages are compromised on and off, so there’s no way to automate that without automating getting pwned :P
Firefox at least gets updated whenever I
pacman -Syu, although each update brings new nonsense, like these new rounded tabs that look so bad you’d think I designed them myself!
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Arch is just too much work for me. However, I did run a rolling-release distro for years at work: openSUSE Tumbleweed. To me it feels more mature and polished than Arch. YMMV of course.
There are (or were) Waterfox packages for it.
I updated every single day before starting work. This way the updates are never that big, and you never get left behind. Btrfs and snapper meant if it went wrong you could always just rewind a day.
COVID killed that off; suddenly I was only in the office a few times a year, if that, and the massive multi-gig updates killed my OS.
But that is my recommendation: if rolling, update daily, without fail.
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Yeah. I’m not running Arch actually, I’m running Manjaro. I agree installing arch feels too difficult. I think the concept behind it is that you should understand enough about each part of your operating system so as to configure it. It is a refreshing philosophy, particularly in this day and age, and what is really impressive is that if you get stuck at any stage there are people in the Arch forums with enough technical knowledge willing to help.
But yeah as a person with other responsibilities than my OS, I don’t have the time really to understand all of these pieces of software! haha This discussion has given me enough motivation to download the tar.gz and have a look at trying waterfox again. :)
Edit: Now writing from Waterfox. It has a better feel than Firefox I have to say, and it seems much more customisable. Worth a shot! Oh and the update thing I was worried about, it has an auto-updater. I can’t test that it works, but if it does then that’ll be great.
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Oh, yes, if you run the tarball and it’s in a directory you own, then it self-updates, which is quite handy.
IKWYM about Arch but what I get in return isn’t enough for me. But I do sometimes run a different DIY distro, Alpine, and in return for my effort I get an OS that’s about 10% of the size of the mainstream
glibcdistros.
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Yes I can’t deal with Arch myself. Manjaro is much easier and works out of the box for me.
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I have tried, and reviewed, Manjaro.
For me an Arch downstream which gates and delays the continuous stream of updates negates the point of running Arch. YMMV.
Of the Arch downstreams I tried, the one I liked was Garuda, which brings better tooling and uses openSUSE’s snapshot and undo tooling to offer a fix for the problems of bad updates.
But, as I think I said, if I wanted a rolling distro, I’d go for Tumbleweed. I am not an Arch fan. I respect it, but its choices are not mine.
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like these new rounded tabs
Setting browser.nova.enabled to false restores the old look but this fallback might go away eventually.
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