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

Sector11 · 2017-08-03 20:19:45

I'm so crazy I like it.

FireFox's fight might do better in the Linux world though.

EDIT: But here's the thing, do we really trust any browser today?

Last edited by Sector11 (2017-08-03 20:20:34)

BLizgreat! · 2017-08-21 10:57:56

Interesting stuff Martix. Not sure what the end result will be. Kinda cheesy imo to macho-up the FF mascot but Mozilla's been in the browser game a long time and somebody felt it serves some purpose.

Yeah Mozilla has been proposing some radical changes, multithread, upgraded rendering engine this and that.

Think Goog making Chrome default in Android was brilliant on their part. Think the Fox has an uphill battle but definitely hope it stays around and pushes on.

Google just has so much networking clout it boggles my mind. A lot of advantages they can leverage on the backend that Mozilla may not be able to match.

Think CDN's everywhere, compression and minification servers (which Opera offers to whatever extent/form.)

Have massive respect for Goog Inc's tech and marketing savvy. Guessing they have some of the worlds top talent on staff.

Not to mention way more aggressive ootb configs and rendering tricks. Been griping for a long time how conserative Mozilla is in this regard.

They leave much to the enduser to tweak, I believe too much honestly. Though it's not my call.

Agree w the nixer who said guessing FF will always keep a place among the opensource community. Have been using it for going on 16yrs and could still learn tonnes about tweaking it.

A million about:config tweaks I've yet to explore, lotsa potential, not enough time. Cant see ever not having FF onboard, shrugs.

Heya Sector, yeah agree with you, hard to trust anything out there in the wild on the webz but honestly consider it a moot point. Just too many ways, too many people can track someone online.

Have long since come to consider the internet like being in public. Not that there's a shortage of ways to remain anonymous either. Only believe it's impractical to go through the trouble for everyday computing.

If someone is up to no good for a no good or even no good for a good cause, yep by all means they may want to cover their butt/tracks. However I still don't care if big brother, the kgb or anyone else knows I occasionally visit naughtynuns.com .

Also heya fellow nixers, haven't been on in awhile. Hope you guys/gals are doing well.

Vll!

Bearded_Blunder · 2017-08-22 00:06:49

MsMattie wrote:

* Seamonkey - I don't use the browser but this package has Komposer, which is a WYSIWYG html editor which comes in handy for rudimentary web pages that are so big it helps to visually see what you are doing rather then hunting through a swarm of code.

One of the reasons Seamonkey my second-choice browser after Opera, as for Chrom[ending] .. well lets's just say that on Windows.. I'll use Edge, or even IE before I'll consider Tarnishium... I mean, i hate systemd, but will use it, as I will use Win 10, the way Chrome has been pushed like a VIRUS, or other bundleware, I've set a GPO in my active directory to prevent installs of it.

As for the OP saying they hear Midori was insecure, I recon the biggest part of that is Debian refusing to keep up with upstream for either it *or* webkit. It's probably way more secure in a rolling distro.

I Just wish there were more *actually workable* choices on Debian than geko blink or webkit, there *are others, but sadly none of them work well enough to use as a daily driver..

I've some very old hardware that will not run anything blink or webkit powered.. and firefox is so slow I've been tempted to issue

wine iexplore.exe

just to see if it's faster.

KrunchTime · 2017-08-22 00:25:02

Bearded_Blunder wrote:

I've some very old hardware that will not run anything blink or webkit powered.. and firefox is so slow I've been tempted to issue
wine iexplore.exe
just to see if it's faster.

I love it...

Bearded_Blunder · 2017-08-22 01:05:20

That pushed me to try it, result

Could not load wine-gecko. HTML rendering will be disabled
err:mshtml:HTMLDocument_Create Failed to init Gecko, returning CLASS_E_CLASSNOTAVAILABLE

Which renders it as unuseful as Chromium or Midori, since netsurf also has problems, that leaves me with:
x-www-browser == dillo

Oh well....

Naik · 2017-08-22 09:32:04

martix wrote:

The following should create a folder called "src", cd into it, download all the necessary .deb files from the site above and install them via gdebi (Edit: As stated above these are packages for Stretch):

mkdir ~/src && cd ~/src && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/58.0.3029.110-1/chromium_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/58.0.3029.110-1/chromium-widevine_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/58.0.3029.110-1/chromium-shell_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/58.0.3029.110-1/chromium-l10n_58.0.3029.110-1_all.deb && wget https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/download/58.0.3029.110-1/chromium-driver_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi chromium_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi chromium-driver_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi chromium-widevine_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb && sudo gdebi chromium-l10n_58.0.3029.110-1_all.deb && sudo gdebi chromium-shell_58.0.3029.110-1_amd64.deb

Could somebody please comment on it whether it works? As far as I tried those commands step by step they did work.

I did and it works. Chromium it self is in the repos and version 60.0.3112.72-1 by now (testing/unstable) so holding the package is needed here too, which also works like you suggested. Nice work! Thank you!

naik --greetz

martix · 2017-08-22 11:48:32

^Great, thank you for trying it out! For me Eloston/Ungoogled Chromium works better than expected. Without all the google=evil-junk, webrtc, etc. it's really great. I should've added a hint regarding installing add-ons. It's fairly easy. I'd suggest to make a bookmark for (and check Menu/Bookmarks/Show bookmarks bar):

chrome://extensions/

and this link:

https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&prodversion=48.0&x=id%3D[EXTENSION_ID]%26installsource%3Dondemand%26uc

There is [EXTENSION_ID] in the link, which has to be replaced. Let's say we want to install ublock Origin. It is in the Chrome Web Store:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm

It's not even needed to open that page, as after a search for it via startpage like "chrome ublock origin" it will show the link -> right-click on it,"copy link address" or "copy link location". Now we need the ID for the add-on, which is the last part of the link: cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm

Copy this ID-part, click the bookmark for the first link, select the part [EXTENSION_ID], replace it (paste) by the ID. Hit Enter to load the link, which will download a .crx file (shown on the bottom of the page). Click the bookmark for the extensions-page and simply drag-and-drop the downloaded file there, which will install the add-on.

There are other ways to do it, but this way is easy enough.

Edit I almost forgot: It works well with Firetools! Browsing in a sandbox is always a good idea.

Bearded_Blunder wrote:

Which renders it as unuseful as Chromium or Midori, since netsurf also has problems, that leaves me with:
x-www-browser == dillo
Oh well....

What about Qupzilla?

Last edited by martix (2017-08-22 12:02:50)

stevep · 2017-09-02 23:33:05

Speaking of Qupzilla, it's changed its name to Falkon to mark its move to the KDE project, though it still will be a strictly Qt 5 browser.

For those with really old hardware, I just added a "palemoon-nonsse2" package to my OBS palemoon repo which won't require SSE 2 support in the CPU. It will conflict with and replace the regular palemoon package, but I haven't rebuilt palemoon yet to have it do the same with the new variant.

The Iridium browser seems to be Chromium, but with as many privacy settings set as max as they can. I built packages for MX on my own laptop, but it needs too much RAM to compile for the OBS to handle.

martix · 2017-11-14 22:41:57

Just a note: Eloston/Ungoogled Chromium 62 is coming soon. And I'm looking forward to testing the Basilisk browser.

There is something I couldn't figure out: I have various add-ons on Chromium, like
- cookie cleaner,
- cache cleaner,
- browser fingerprinting protection.

Let's say I visited the Manchester United site on facebook - facebook.com/ManU. I cleaned the cookies and cache, shutdown the machine. Next time using a search engine with "ManU facebook" it shows various results and of course also facebook.com/ManU. <- This link has a different - darker - color, indicating that I already visited that website.

How does the search engine know that the site was visited by me earlier? Where is that info stored?

Edit: OK, I think I got it now. The info is coming from History! Wasn't there something a couple of years ago that websites should not be able to check a user's history in browsers? I'm a bit surprised that for a website checking History in a browser is available (at least it is in Chromium).

Last edited by martix (2017-11-14 23:23:10)

BLizgreat! · 2017-11-15 00:00:19

Thanks everyone for the replies and info provided. There's this Quantum thing on the horizon of Firefox. Played with it and not at all liking it. Though it's new territory and don't doubt it'll get better and can be tweaked to whatever extent. Personally going to hold off for awhile and keep the latest version v56.0.2 for awhile.

Been meaning to push the envelope, a metric gazillion tweaks yet to bother messing with and in my really limited sidy-by-side in current FF vs FF-beta aka: Quantum, the old fox is only a tiny bit slower in terms of browsing speed. While MUCH less intensive when considering system overhead. Hope it ends up working out for Mozilla and Firefox fans.

johnraff · 2017-11-15 01:04:35

martix wrote:

Next time using a search engine with "ManU facebook" it shows various results and of course also facebook.com/ManU. <- This link has a different - darker - color, indicating that I already visited that website.
How does the search engine know that the site was visited by me earlier? Where is that info stored?
Edit: OK, I think I got it now. The info is coming from History! Wasn't there something a couple of years ago that websites should not be able to check a user's history in browsers? I'm a bit surprised that for a website checking History in a browser is available (at least it is in Chromium).

The website doesn't have to know about your history. The browser is almost certainly recolouring previously visited links by itself, just based on whether they are listed in the History or not.

That said, there has been (and may still be) an issue with css rules that a website might set. It might choose, for example, a custom image as background for visited links. While the browser is the one that knows about the History, if it then chooses the css-selected background image for "visited links", then it might have to send the website a request to download that image. Malicious sites can set individually named images for each link eg img-www_somesite_com-visited.png so just by requesting that image your browser tells the site that you've visited that link.

This did come up a few years ago, but I don't remember if Firefox (or others) implemented a way of blocking it (eg just by downloading all the images in advance). The general advice at that time was either to disable History completely, or set it to remember for only a short time.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2017-11-15 07:06:21

martix wrote:

Let's say I visited the Manchester United site on facebook - facebook.com/ManU. I cleaned the cookies and cache, shutdown the machine. Next time using a search engine with "ManU facebook" it shows various results and of course also facebook.com/ManU. <- This link has a different - darker - color, indicating that I already visited that website.

Have you considered visiting a better page? 8o

martix · 2017-11-15 13:11:59

johnraff wrote:

The browser is almost certainly recolouring previously visited links by itself, just based on whether they are listed in the History or not.

I see, thank you for the explanation. That was a nasty way of finding out user's browsing history with those background files... It's a different method, but e.g. facebook is still tracking user's browsing history after they logged out (and did not take any protecting steps). I'm also wondering if websites could e.g. check on user's bookmarks? These are often things someone would not think about (just like websites checking the battery level through the browser), but there are often smart and not really scrupulous companies building certain tools around them.

@HoaS ManU was just for an example's sake, I don't have strong feelings about them. But there is one and only !

Last edited by martix (2017-11-15 13:27:04)

johnraff · 2017-11-16 03:17:30

martix wrote:

I'm also wondering if websites could e.g. check on user's bookmarks? These are often things someone would not think about (just like websites checking the battery level through the browser), but there are often smart and not really scrupulous companies building certain tools around them.

Javascript was designed from the start to have very limited access to the system, so battery level sounds out. I'm not sure, however if it can read bookmarks - I would have thought not, but it would take some googling to be sure...

BLizgreat! · 2017-11-17 18:36:30

Interesting, I had a change of heart and wanted to go ahead and give FF v57 a shot, it's not acting nowhere near as badly as when I tried it not too long ago in beta. Actually quickly warming up to the thing. There's no noscript yet but look's like it's supposed to be coming soon. Though have no idea who the people at that site are, shrugs.

In the meantime found a stand-in, simple push a button to block javascript on x-website, push it again to clear the site. Thing definitely has it's limitations. Installed FF v57 from the LMDE2 repository. Have to admit it's a bit faster than the other/older, not by a mind blowing measure and still fully believe could tweak v56.0.2 to match or would bet exceed it, even if it's not multi-process blahblah. Plenty of tricks up sleeve that I'd never even gotten around to applying. Oh well, actually liking the thing so far. Keeps acting like it is, will have to embrace the new and upgrade the old Firefox.

Will be monitoring system stats, stability and other metric's but looks like Mozilla may've taken a step forward here. Yay !

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-11-17 18:41:48)

martix · 2017-11-17 21:29:11

I'm just curious: Firefox Quantum has been officially released three days ago.

How long will it take appr. till it gets into the debian stable repos?

BLizgreat! · 2017-11-17 23:02:27

Personal opinion on that ? Ummmmm, about the the time, or maybe the next time a Debian release goes stable. It's not really funny and has long been a source of frustration for me, first the stupid iceweasel thing, now the weirdness with firefox-esr. You have several options, all of them would work just fine. You'll have many tell you not to run a mixed branch system, though with a tad of common sense, you'll encounter zero problems with any of the following. In order of advisement, though again ... they're all harmless.

a. Download directly from Mozilla for x86 or x86_64, then run it from a directory in /home/username. <== Have done this FOREVER, since #! Statler dys.

b. Hit up the Mozilla Firefox archive and do the same. <== This too, you can run multiple versions of FF no problem on a gnu/Linux OS. Even ancient ones.

c. Add a fully compatible Debian stable based distro's repositories to sources.list ie: As I did with LMDE2 or AntiX (if they have latest Firefox in their repo's don't know atm.) Then if you want to do it right take 20mins to learn about apt-pinning, if you don't simply #comment out that other distro's repo's in sources.list, after you've installed latest FF from it and "sudo apt-get update" afterwards.

d. Visit Mozilla's apt site, tell it you're running Debian testing and it'll tell you to add the Debian unstable repositories to sources.list, then install from there with ie: "sudo apt-get install -t unstable firefox" Again, someone can simply #comment out unstable repo's afterwards, update packages again, though again better to take the 20mins to learn a bit about apt-pin, then occasionally you can check for newer versions in whichever repositories in your sources.list "apt-cache policy firefox" will show install candidates and which repo they're in and you can then install those newer versions if upgrades are available. <== done forever too, no problems.

e. Gentoo style ! Depending on your hardware specs, spend 1-2hrs compiling Firefox from source. <== Not doing it but if you truly want to be a Nix-ninja, that's how they do it.

Messing around it's just a web-browser, not some massively important system package(s). Anyone tracking Debian stable branch or anything based on it, who doesn't have the latest version of Firefox available is only because they're choosing not to have it. Can be somewhat of a mixed blessing sometimes too as in a much beloved extension which isn't going to get ported to newer Firefox. Though again ... easy enough to download a version from Mozilla's archives to use that extension indefinitely.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-11-17 23:05:54)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2017-11-17 23:58:24

martix wrote:

How long will it take appr. till it gets into the debian stable repos?

The Debian release follows the ESR version of Firefox, I think this makes perfect sense in the context of the rest of the distribution and I for one would hate it if Debian decided to ship mainline FF with their official release.

As such, the next ESR version will be 59 and when Mozilla push that out Debian will package it up for whatever is stable then (and probably oldstable as well) so maybe by the time Lithium rolls around.

BLizgreat! wrote:

It's not really funny and has long been a source of frustration for me, first the stupid iceweasel thing, now the weirdness with firefox-esr.

It's not stupid or weird, the stable release of Debian should use the ESR version of FF, if you prefer buggy new software then use sid instead

EDIT: also, long live Iceweasel!

https://packages.debian.org/stretch/xul … l-branding

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2017-11-18 00:06:53)

BLizgreat! · 2017-11-18 01:05:31

Man I hope you're trying to bait me. Buggy eh, been running latest Firefox on all things Debian stable, mixed, Sid and everything inbetween since shortly after finding #! Statler, shrugs. Though if people would rather use dated versions of something like a web-browser, entirely up to them. Guessing options 1-5 outlined above makes things fairly clear, which I've done all except Gentoo style for going on 7 years w/o issue. There's all of no chance in hades, I'd ever spent 2 hours compiling a web-browser, shrugs.

martix · 2017-11-18 03:17:47

That's a neat little guide there, thank you @BLiz!

I gave Quantum a try and it's definitely an improvement. The handling of the browser is very different - better - in comparison to the ESR version (at least that was my impression). I hope the add-ons I used to have will be coming in the future (some are there already).

#61 2017-08-03 20:19:45

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

#62 2017-08-21 10:57:56

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

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