An Exercise Program for the Fat Web
blog.codinghorror.com> It's kind of scary how powerful DNS can be, isn't it?
And that, I think, is why we see a push for DNS-over-HTTPS and other things: because eventually Google (and other device manufacturers) will only use the network-provided DNS servers to find their DNS servers. And of course your device will only use Google's servers, for your security of course.
You might think that sounds crazy, but we've already seen it come to pass: Android apps will now ignore owner-supplied root certs. This means that the device owner cannot inspect HTTPS traffic sent by his own device.
The endgame is that we're not really owners of our own computing devices, but simply renters of media-consumption appliances.
If I don't own my technology, I sadly own very little. It makes me really sad.
Switching to Firefox costs $0 and works on every network, not just your home net.
It's also hella buggy on macOS for me, which is irritating - my browser is the only thing I need to work 100% of the time. As much as I'd like to reduce Google's browser monopoly, I consciously choose to make this one exception.
Any particular bugs that are annoying you? The main one for most people seems to be excessive battery consumption on retina displays, which is being worked on (requires switching the renderer interface over to Core Animation, so is understandably taking a while). Apart from that I can only think of minor annoyances compared to some of the problems with Chrome like major memory consumption and the gradual strangling of personal privacy extensions.
In my experience, watching videos (YouTube, Twitch, etc.) for longer than a few minutes frequently causes Firefox to overload my CPU and bring my entire system to a crawl.
That is the only major issue I have with Firefox. I still use it as my main browser. For one thing, container tabs are a killer feature.
I don't think most experience what you do with video in Firefox, I wonder if you have hardware acceleration disabled.
I was interested in Firefox containers but quickly lost interest when I discovered Firefox Sync doesn't sync container configurations, I wasn't going to replicate them in multiple places.
I had to switch to Chrome after Firefox caused my computer (macOS Mojave, 2012 MBP Retina) to freeze to the degree of requiring restart every few days. Even when it didn’t freeze the entire machine, the browser itself would lock up a few times a day. During the course of normal use, my CPU temps would jump to 100°+ from a baseline of ~55°. (And battery life was disappointing, as other comments have noted.)
These issues occurred when my computer was plugged into a charger or on battery power. Replacing the thermal compound, thoroughly cleaning the fans, and reducing the number of open tabs and windows didn’t resolve this. Chrome doesn’t appear to cause these issues on my machine, holding all other workload and plugins constant.
I really want to use Firefox but cannot rely on it currently.
Add-on context menus display only when launching them through overflow menu, it doesn't work when I put the icon next to the navbar.
I have a smaller DPI non-retina MBP2012 and I always set the default page size to 80% in Chrome. I used two extensions for the same functionality in Firefox (Fixed Zoom and a second one that worked a bit better) but I always had issues with the sites being bigger than the viewport and having to scroll around them to see the content. Images were the biggest victim to this behaviour.
You are right - there are issues in Chrome, but I don't feel them as much in my day to day life and it counts for me.
Trackpad doesn't give bouncy overscroll, which is how the rest of my software scrolls. Also don't like the UI for trackpad forward/back.
It's a very non-function related nitpick, but it bugs me constantly so I have a hard time sticking with it.
Sync with the unchangeable default iOS browser is another one, but not a lot Mozilla can do about that.
It's slow and eats a lot of battery on Mac. It's a known issue.
Define hella buggy? What's not working for you?
(apart from the obvious recent f-up with the addon signing obviously, which—while glaring—was at least a one-off)
Have you tried brave? Not sure if it has feature parity, but it is a new take on a chromium based browser.
I did for some months, but the synchronisation isn't working yet for iOS. I'll gladly switch to it once they have it working.
Only if you don't value your time. This would at least require me to search for equivalent plugins.
You’ll find that a lot of the extensions are the same ones, now that Firefox has switched over to Chrome’s WebExtension model as a base.
Firefox has some better plugins and features, like container tabs. You can block ads with the built-in tracking protection, uBlock Origin (not uBlock), and uMatrix.
> Eye/o GmbH owns AdBlock and uBlock
Wow, I didn't realize the same company that owns Adblock also owns uBlock.org (but not ublock origin)
Doesn't DNS over HTTPS and HSTS bypass pihole?
(isn't it funny how every single "modern web security" feature, from DNS over HTTPS, to HSTS even to HTTPS itself always ends up with someone giving up control to 3rd parties yet this is always dismissed and pushed through insane amounts of peer pressure - usually by people who have vested interests in those 3rd parties - because 'security'?)
My network is setup so local dns goes to the pi-hole which uses dns over https.
DNS over HTTPS against a server you can't choose would do so, yes.
You could still shut down the initial DNS query for the dns-over-https provider and make it unreachable
Some people refuse devices that do not accept DHCP assigned DNS servers.[1]
[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/WCVv57IizUSjNb2R...
You can also reroute port 53 traffic not from your internal dns server to your dns server...
So does simply using a different DNS server than the network supplies, unless you’re blocking port 53.
Pi-Hole is a great tool, just make sure to be exhaustive in your testing to see if it will break any services you depend on.
When I unboxed my old Kindle one day I couldn’t get syncing to work and had no idea why for several days until I tried adding a pass-through filter for Amazon in Pi-Hole, which was the culprit.
I am interested in what happens when you get to a website that insists you turn off your ad blocker. What happens with Pi Hole?
Also I would prefer to just run Privoxy as I have Ubuntu running and can just use that instead of some extra gadget. What happens with Privoxy if you are getting a turn off ad blocker message?
Currently I use 'cat block' or the 'EFF' blocker, depending on what computer I am on, those give you an option to turn off your ad blocker which I find myself doing from time to time, it would be nice to have this option with Privoxy.
There is a firefox extension you can use to temporarily disable the PiHole blocking on your network with one click so you don't have to visit your PiHole webpage and do it manually.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-pi-hol...
You can disable blocking temporarily (a few seconds to a few minutes) in the PiHole dashboard.
That sounds rather inconvenient compared to the two-click option in uBlock Origin.
It is actually incredibly easy if you use a password manager and have your local pi-hole credentials all saved. Maybe 4 clicks and I've disabled both my pi-holes (primary and backup) for 15 minutes.
I've been running 2 pi-holes for almost a year. I've been surprised at how well they work and how few sites have issues. I've only encountered 2 problems: 1) Administering Google Ads... Of course it needs to be disabled. 2) Oddly enough Lowes website has very odd online ordering issues unless you disable the pi-holes.
its literally a 2 click option in pi-hole.
It's maybe a few extra seconds.
In addition to the temporary disable option available at /admin on your pi-hole, you can whitelist domains if you really need to access them and you can't with blocking.