Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Browser News: Firefox and Vivaldi (Damp Edition)

From yesterday afternoon though early this morning, the Houston metro area was inundated with rains causing extensive flooding. Highways, bayous, side-streets all have become waterways. Kayaks are more useful right now than cars.

Telework is a good thing for your staff. Just saying.

So while we wait for the waters to recede here are some links touching on Firefox and Vivaldi web browser developments.

Mozilla Firefox

It is just me or does it seem that there are more and more tweaks needed to remove/disable “features” being added to Firefox. I remember the good-old-days when Mozilla Firefox was the browser to go to for a lean-mean no-bloatware featured product. That’s what the “add-on/extension” platform was so exciting. If you wanted to add features, you decided what you wanted and added it! No more it seems. Sigh.

Vivaldi

I’m spending more time settling into Vivaldi. It still runs #4 (behind Firefox, Chromium, and IE 11) as a go-to browser for me. That said if development continues at this pace, it might just get swapped with my Chromium build.

The inclusion of a “true” bookmark side-bar feature is the biggest factor attracting me to Vivaldi. If you have been a hard-core Firefox user and depend on the bookmark side-bar in Firefox, the lack of a corresponding feature in Chrome/Chromium is a real hassle to swapping.

If you haven’t checked out the Vivaldi web-browser project yet, I encourage you to do so. It is still in a Technical Preview/snapshot state but so far it has been very stable for me. I wouldn’t use it with any high-security (banking/bill-pay/shopping) sites due to it’s current build state, but for general web-surfing and meme-following, it is very smooth and dependable.

Cheers,

Claus Valca.

3 comments:

FF Extension Guru said...

"It is just me or does it seem that there are more and more tweaks needed to remove/disable “features” being added to Firefox. I remember the good-old-days when Mozilla Firefox was the browser to go to for a lean-mean no-bloatware featured product. That’s what the “add-on/extension” platform was so exciting. If you wanted to add features, you decided what you wanted and added it! No more it seems."

No, it is not just you. It is getting to the point where the majority of requests (especially from family) I am getting are for disabling 'features' that Mozilla seems to think that users want to have. It is getting more bloated and still nowhere as stable as Chrome.

Claus said...

@ FF Guru - Good to know it's not just me.

When I start to be critical I feel guilty since I've been using Firefox for so long.

When Vivaldi is developed enough to stably support Add-on/Extensions from the Chrome store I'm going to have to make some hard decisions if I keep using Firefox as my primary "working/production" browser or if I will depreciate it behind Vivaldi/Chromium & Internet Explorer 11.

I thought I would never see the day that I said that.

Cheers.

--CV

FF Extension Guru said...

I rarely use Firefox these days except for testing and troubleshooting. Next May will mark the 10th Anniversary of my Firefox blog. Of course back then it was Internet Explorer 6 or a handfull of third party browsers which were still based off the IE Trident rendering engine. A big reason I still use Firefox is I have a couple Greasemonkey scripts I use on an older discussion board site that never worked correctly with Google Chrome's Tampermonkey.