Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-04 09:14:31

Yep more babble, same time Quantum is kinda raining on my keep an OS decently usable even with only 512mbs. Esp when employing tweaks like increasing # of content processes as I've done and will continue playing with. Though mentioned these can be lowered ie 2 vs 4 processes and with noscript, would still run fine on really RAM limited hardware surely. Plus already mentioned people who want continued support for legacy FF extensions too.

Ahhhh, both are readily available, I'd still say something known to be mucho faster is bound to be better received than something dated with legacy extensions support. Still not my decision and still just pointlessly babbling and droning on about browsers. Am going to dork for awhile and then see about increasing it to 8 me thinks.

Update: Looks like 7 is max, likely w/o having to dig through about:config anyway and nah, guess better stick with 6 for awhile and observe things. Also random add thought was some interesting stuff in it and possibly useful. Though always tend to monitor, monitor, check and recheck to make sure nothing oddball is going on behind scenes do to some FF tweakage poorly applied or understood.

Yep here's the config option in about:config which controls this. It's dom.ipc.processCount mines still currently showing 6, had also seen webpgs of people discussing having bumped it up higher than the 7 in preferences and reporting no problems. May dial it up to 8, probably hang out here at 6 for awhile. Memory isn't bad using more of them and noted below browser seems faster, more responsive and smoother in multitab operation. Somewhat interesting, just wanted to note it here in the browser babble file.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-12-04 13:48:55)

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-04 12:05:28

More random dorking w Quantum + noscript + 6 content processes enabled. Below shows all 6 are clearly in use. This is with 21tabs open. Cycled through them, having clicked each once and ensured page fully loaded, ready for viewing.

257.3 MiB + 21.6 MiB = 278.9 MiB firefox
462.2 MiB + 71.8 MiB = 534.0 MiB Web Content (6)

@813mbs.

Then briefly afterwards as in like less than 30secs ps_mem says.

184.6 MiB + 21.6 MiB = 206.1 MiB firefox
375.5 MiB + 71.8 MiB = 447.3 MiB Web Content (6)

653mbs, hmmmm. Odd but fine too. Ok ... burnt out on dorking with Quantum for a bit, will revisit it soon enough. Overall after monitoring stats, do think increasing number of content processes is worthwhile, at least certainly no harm in playing with it. Do believe the browser is faster, somewhat more responsive and seems to me smoother when opening a ridiculous amount of tabs as I've been doing here, whereas before there was some slight lag that seems to be gone now.

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-04 17:51:05

Yeap more pointless babble, sheesh this is more like a babble monologue than a browserage thread, arghhhh. Also was seeing horrible and disturbing system stats with Quantum while beta and after too without noscript support. Had me freaking out, to the point was openly considering abandoning FF. Knew it was new, knew noscript or ways to simulate what the extension does would come on over, so cooler heads in ma bean prevailed and decided to hang onto v56.0.2 until xyz found it's way. Yeah when you have a dozen tabs open and a web-browser is using 1.2/1.4 or more gbs RAM and not being bashful about it's use of cpu(s) yep, was not happy.

Now am very happy overall and things are back in line with what I expect and want from FF. Mozilla rushed, supposedly like 2mnths pushing out all these major changes to FF, yep ... will assume there's going to have to be some bumps in the road, bugs to be squashed but appears to be a good step forward for Mozilla and it's userbase. Stats I've been seeing and posting make it clear, Quantum doesn't have to be a massive resource sucking pigdog. Fairly easy solutions readily available to get it back in line, while still reaping noticeable benefits.

So just reinterating, nope might not want to make it default this very moment, though all things considered, may want to, shrugs. Am going to use it as mainstay, play with it and see what gains I can eek out of it. So far very satisfied with how things are developing. Yep, still want to see Mozilla/Firefox give Goog Inc a black-eye or two, perhaps a coupla missing teeth too, shrugs.

Anyone who buys into the Google motto, do no evil, clearly doesn't know much about Google Inc, though have mucho respect for them too and kinda get where they're coming from, do no evil but don't be fooli$h either. Am sure they've got many the techie which makes me look retarded in every meaningful metric. You don't hire the best and then accept crappy results. That's reasonable enough in anyone's view of things.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-12-04 17:51:47)

martix · 2017-12-04 21:39:33

johnraff wrote:

Anyone using Vivaldi?
There was interest in adding it to the wwwbrowsers pipemenu options at one point...

I think Vivaldi is one of the best browsers atm.

On the other hand Pale Moon is also one of the best browsers right now. Just like the Brave browser. And above all Ungoogled Chromium seems to be also a very good choice (v62 is out). All of them are easy to find and install (apart from Ungoogled Chromium). So is it a good idea with a pipe menu or is it just clutter? I'm not sure.

@BLiz I really like Ungoogled Chromium, because it's easy on resources, responsive and almost all the extensions for Chrome work here too. It's free from g*evil-junk and it's pretty fast, so it delivers a great browsing experience (especially with the right extensions).

Edit: Oh, I almost forgot Midori. And there is also Qupzilla, which has a certain fan base too, but it will be called Falkon in the future. And the Basilisk browser has been released!

Last edited by martix (2017-12-04 21:47:01)

MALsPa · 2017-12-05 03:11:37

ungoogled-chromium does look interesting, but maybe too much hassle (for me) to install and keep updated (in Stretch). I see it available for Arch (from AUR) but it's currently flagged "out-of-date" there.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2017-12-05 07:07:54

MALsPa wrote:

I see it available for Arch (from AUR) but it's currently flagged "out-of-date" there.

I'm not in Arch atm but I think this PKGBUILD should install the latest version:

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Head … 8/PKGBUILD

Test with:

mkdir ~/ungoogled && cd ~/ungoogled
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Head-on-a-Stick/fe2850256270e5b1eb0e7ad6517da8fc/raw/0e793cb6534a29e1517b2197ba24cd33a965bc12/PKGBUILD
makepkg -sri

Let me know if it works and I will add a note to the AUR page

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2017-12-05 17:05:36)

MALsPa · 2017-12-05 07:23:59

Wow. Awesome -- I wasn't expecting a response like that! I'm gonna take a pass on it, though. Maybe somebody else will see that post and want to try it. Thanks, though!

martix · 2017-12-05 15:53:04

MALsPa wrote:

ungoogled-chromium does look interesting, but maybe too much hassle (for me) to install and keep updated (in Stretch).

Actually in Strech it's easier than it looks. Simply running this command (requires wget and gdebi) will install Ungoogled Chromium v62 (creating a folder called ~/src and downloading the deb packages and install from there):

mkdir ~/src && cd ~/src && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/62.0.3202.94-1/ungoogled-chromium_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/62.0.3202.94-1/ungoogled-chromium-widevine_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/62.0.3202.94-1/ungoogled-chromium-shell_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/62.0.3202.94-1/ungoogled-chromium-l10n_62.0.3202.94-1_all.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/62.0.3202.94-1/ungoogled-chromium-driver_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/62.0.3202.94-1/ungoogled-chromium-common_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi ungoogled-chromium-common_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi ungoogled-chromium_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi ungoogled-chromium-driver_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi ungoogled-chromium-widevine_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi ungoogled-chromium-l10n_62.0.3202.94-1_all.deb && sudo gdebi ungoogled-chromium-shell_62.0.3202.94-1_amd64.deb

In case there was v58 Ungoogled Chromium already installed - or Chromium -, it requires first:

sudo apt remove chromium chromium-shell

After the install the .deb packages and ~/src can be removed. Here is how to install extensions in an easy way - that's all...

Last edited by martix (2017-12-05 22:50:50)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2017-12-05 17:31:57

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

Test with:

mkdir ~/ungoogled && cd ~/ungoogled
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Head-on-a-Stick/fe2850256270e5b1eb0e7ad6517da8fc/raw/0e793cb6534a29e1517b2197ba24cd33a965bc12/PKGBUILD
makepkg -sri

^ This doesn't work.

That PKGBUILD just downloads and installs the source code, the actual chromium binary is not included

Unfortunately, the only binary available for the latest version is for Debian stretch and it won't work in Arch because libicui18n.so has had a soname bump.

I will look at the non-binary AUR package, that should be update-able (is that a word?) but it would mean compiling chromium locally, which doesn't sound like fun.

EDIT: manually compiling ungoogled-chromium is rather more complicated than I had hoped and the instructions have changed significantly since the AUR package was created so it will take me a while to work through this.

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2017-12-05 18:22:04)

johnraff · 2017-12-06 01:35:01

These "minority" browsers like Vivaldi, PaleMoon, Midori... are they kept up to date with all the security upgrades that Firefox and Chrom{e,ium} get?

---
BTW, according to StartPage:

StartPage wrote:

For Firefox Quantum (v 57.0.1), the default search engine is aggressively changed to Google during update, disregarding your previous settings.

Sun For Miles · 2017-12-06 02:13:58

johnraff wrote:

according to StartPage:
StartPage wrote:
For Firefox Quantum (v 57.0.1), the default search engine is aggressively changed to Google during update, disregarding your previous settings.

Not true in my case. It looks like StartPage plugin coding error to me without any inspection of the problem. The default engine for me after the upgrade is still DuckDuckGo in new tab, search and address bar. Upgrade didn't mess with manually turned off "safebrowsing" options as well. Those were my main degoogling setting in FF and I didn't bother to check if other things related to rendering web pages kept their 1s and 0s, since everything seems to be in order.

The only negative thing I've noticed with Quantum before upgrade from 57.0.0 to 57.0.1 was incredible memory leak in one case where a tab ate 3GB of RAM for no apparent reason. Cba to troubleshoot and find true cause of that, I'm just pointing fingers at NoScript with popcorns in my mouth.

ohnonot · 2017-12-06 08:25:14

I have a deep suspicion towards all chromium clones, esp. if they're trying to hop on the "we're morally superior because we run on linux" train.
that certainly goes for vivaldi, who, it seems, did some pro-forma open-sourcing of their code (idk what the current status is; it was first closed source, then partly open-sourced, but no git repo or anything like it).
but it seems i might be willing to revise my position on that.
one of the devs is active on linuxquestions, seems to be using slackware himself.
they just rolled out an experimental arm build.
any current info on their open-source status? is it possible to obtain a compilable source package?

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-06 22:44:38

Thanks for all the interesting adds fellas. Johnsan, believe all of them receive some development efforts. Always just assumed it can't be on par with the biggies in browserage though, not in terms of effort, skills or testing, that's just an assumption and/or reasonable conclusion. Not anything concrete and it's been a long time since bothered messing with any of the fringe browsers. In side-by-side they always came up short anyway.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-12-06 22:45:27)

martix · 2017-12-07 00:55:34

johnraff wrote:

These "minority" browsers like Vivaldi, PaleMoon, Midori... are they kept up to date with all the security upgrades that Firefox and Chrom{e,ium} get?

Regarding Jessie it was in the release notes that - because of security reasons -: "For general web browser use we recommend Iceweasel or Chromium." I guess it has not changed much, even if the developers behind each browser make security upgrades from time to time.

johnraff · 2017-12-07 02:12:52

^Indeed. The web browser is perhaps the one thing on a system that needs to be as secure as possible, considering all the places it might go...

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-08 11:12:59

Just checking in fellows of course brought along some more FF babble too. Yep, still approving of this upping the number of content processes in Quantum. Seemed good mojo for sure, was more responsive. Mentioned some minor lag while opening many tabs with the right click, open in new tab, it'd somewhat hesitate as the number climbed. This is abated to an extent after enabling more of them/content things.

Also am starting to get a sneaking suspicion that I may've been falsely attributing the hesitation to Quantum, as am starting to dork around with the default power governor on my nixiness more and getting more familiar with ondemand. Thinking yes, it's defaults I've always just assumed would be fine and mostly are (OS's running great), though have been holding this old laptop back. After installing cpufreq-utils and running some cli with it, noticed it's been keeping my cpu(s) freqs WAY down, a good majority of the time. So had to step up a bunch of configs for it, as having a system capable of 4.3ghz between the 2 cores but is being held back to 2.x most the time, even though am on AC-cord pretty much always, doesn't make much sense to me.

Anyway, long babbling way of saying, if cpu(s) would've been scaling up the way they should've, that lag in Quantum likely wouldnt've been there, theory atm. Not overall sure about all this junk either, so gonna shut it.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-12-08 11:34:55)

martix · 2017-12-08 23:21:33

Look at this: Brave browser is implementing some kind of content-maker-reward system, which can be tested by downloading the browser and turning this feature on.

Steve · 2017-12-09 02:40:40

I have been reading up on various firefox tweaks/privacy etc today here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Privacy

Disable WebRTC is a good one if you dont need it... https://www.privacytools.io/webrtc.html

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-15 10:16:02

FF babble update:

Mentioned up there, you can increase or lower the number of content processes in this new multiprocess Firefox thing and the about:config option relevant to it. Typing this cause noticed in FF v 56.0.2 you have the option of increasing them in the same way in about:preferences too. Though the default is 1 content process in that version.

Made me notice with Quantum, someone could presumably lower it to only 1 as well. Haven't messed with lowering it, have been going the other way and raising it to 6 vs default of 4. As noted think it made things a bit smoother/faster and as advertised slightly heavier in terms of RAM and/or cpu, shrugs. Overall have yet to really wrap my head around any major significance of it all. Though am sure that stems from ignorance. Oh well ... might lower it on a really RAM constrained system and raise it a tad on a memory rich one but wouldn't get ridiculous with it either, I consider 4gigs memory rich btw. Both versions continue running great.

Thanks Steve, Arch wiki links/reminders are usually welcome, always tend to find something interesting in there somewhere.

Viva la Arch wiki !!!

Steve · 2017-12-15 10:32:37

Yeah the archwiki has a lot of great tips on making the firefox browser more secure and privacy focused.

#241 2017-12-04 09:14:31

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#242 2017-12-04 12:05:28

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#243 2017-12-04 17:51:05

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#244 2017-12-04 21:39:33

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#245 2017-12-05 03:11:37

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#246 2017-12-05 07:07:54

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#247 2017-12-05 07:23:59

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#248 2017-12-05 15:53:04

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#249 2017-12-05 17:31:57

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#250 2017-12-06 01:35:01

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#251 2017-12-06 02:13:58

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#252 2017-12-06 08:25:14

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#253 2017-12-06 22:44:38

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#254 2017-12-07 00:55:34

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#255 2017-12-07 02:12:52

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#256 2017-12-08 11:12:59

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#257 2017-12-08 23:21:33

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#258 2017-12-09 02:40:40

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#259 2017-12-15 10:16:02

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

#260 2017-12-15 10:32:37

Re: Your views/experiences with web browsers fellow nixers ? :)

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