I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen for about 2 seconds.
I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.
I've stayed (edit: with Firefox) because of (1) containers and (2) password storage. I have to use Chrome for some things, and every now and then it prompts me for a password and refuses to use the auto-fill. Totally torques me off because my passwords are not easy.
But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
>But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
Not that I don't trust them but I always recommend using a dedicated PW manager like KeePassXC which is FOSS and has been security audited, plus it gives you full control over where you get to store your PWs and how they're secured and generated.
To be fair, Firefox is also FOSS, contains an integrated password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility, and by opting to use a master password to encrypt or decrypt the store also gives you control over securitization, storage location, and generation.
Not to say that KeePassXC isn’t useful if you want even more fine-grained controls, but it seems like in the
> Use password in browser
Use case, KeePass would actually weaken the security guarantee by adding a second component you need to trust.
My problem with Firefox's password manager is there doesn't seem to be a way to export/import to/from an encrypted file that I can back up to other places. I can export to an unencrypted text file (and no apparent way to import again), or I can use their sync service (or run my own maybe?), or I can backup the entire firefox profile.
This is what Firefox says when I go to export my logins: "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
KeePassXC on the other hand gives me a simple encrypted database file that I can copy around to different places for some peace of mind.
> "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
That's effectively what almost all of them say when you export your logins (usually as CSV, JSON, or XML), because they export in plain text, because you don't know what the user needs it for, up to and including manual imputation (better than expect a random user to have to learn how to print out a database, or worse submit that database file to some online service to print out).
Users aren't necessarily highly computer literate, we don't want to prevent people from having security, but even if they were they may still have use cases that do not accept such a database (migrating password manager that don't know your previous one, perhaps), so most of them use (unencrypted) plain text and just accept they'll have to leave it in the user's hands, and warn them it's exposed.
We'd absolutely love there to be safe, portable ways to move our data around such that it remains encrypted while migrating, yes, but that's just not something our current crop of software really enables fully these days, unfortunately.
I'd even say "adding a second vendor you need to trust". Yes, these days there seems to be a strong drive to just get a big package out of a single hand. Like having the browser closely tied to the OS. I don't like it. I prefer to choose the individual parts as i see fit. Keepass and some bit of custom sync, in this case.
Now, in the same vein I expect MS & Google making it easy to support different browsers, I'd want Mozilla making it easy to integrate other password managers. I'd love to be corrected, but afaik the "password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility" doesn't offer any way or API to connect my keepass with it. Its only for Mozilla's own stuff. Not the open, user controlled system i'd love Firefox to be.
The Firefox Android Addon system is even worse... only a very short list of pre-approved extensions are available. With the escape hatch for devs requiring some stupid online-account. Sorry, but how is that different from an App store without side-loading?
Still recommend using Firefox, since it is the best we have. But yeah, i don't like the less and less open direction apparently chosen by Mozilla. And wonder if not being a good role model will hurt them down the line...
It would limit the scope of the damage. Instead of getting the entire password database, the keylogger would only get those passwords that were used while the system was compromised.
True, but keyloggers aren't one of the threat vectors I am most concerned about, and as mcpackieh said, it still limits the potential damage quite a lot.
We all have to gear our security mechanisms toward our particular threat assessments.
What is your biggest concern? I would think key loggers are a more common threat than attacks on the password manager directly, especially if you're running something niche. What else do you gain from keeping it air gapped?
Keyloggers rank low for me because I'm only using my own devices that I have physical control over, so a dongle is unlikely. A keylogger would have to come in through malware.
That's certainly possible, but if malware were able to get installed despite my other protections, then I probably have much larger issues. And the keylogger would have to phone home with the data, which is unlikely (but not impossible) to happen without raising some alarms.
So I'm more worried about sharing data with the password management company systems themselves. If there's no real reason to send data over the net, then I don't want to send data over the net. The smaller the attack surface, the better.
It's just my personal policy. In reality, I don't consider either keyloggers or password management company computers to be huge enough risks that I lose sleep over them. Plus, I don't want to become reliant on a particular piece of software to do important things -- typing my password by hand means that I'll have the most common passwords memorized, so if something goes wrong that prevents the use of the password manager, I'm not locked out of anything.
This is unfortunately not robust against phishing which is for most users the bigger risk IMO (not necessarily power users, but I'd argue that most power users are too sure about themselves in this regard). It's always a question about the threat vectors and this weight you give them.
Firefox password management on desktop is great. I've got very frustrated with it on mobile (Android) over the last 6 months, with it failing to recognise password fields on account creation to generate passwords. I was relying on Firefox password management but have just transitioned to Bitwarden.
I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only a few hours old.
I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it, or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it and lost interest.
Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.
It's just ADHD, there's not really a workflow reason that I have 1000+ tabs open. It just kind of happens.
Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0].
Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that organization at least a little bit easier.
It's ADHD sure, but it's also an unwillingness to close tabs, and (generally) that we have poor windowing systems that force us into ~1-2 browser windows at a time because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
The big change for me has been realizing that all my "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my way back to a website via my history or via searching the web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of them?
Most of the times when I've tried finding stuff in (Firefox) history, I wasn't able to. Unless it's in the last week or so. In my experience, history filtering and search options are too basic to be useful. Once I was even desperate enough to try to load some Firefox sqlite file directly, hoping to query history entries, but that didn't work out.
The only reliable way that I've come across for finding stuff after a long time has passed is saving every sightly interesting webpage to Zotero and using fulltext search afterwards (including webpage body).
I'm curious, do you find the builtin browser history facilities sufficient for your needs, or are you using some third party tool for that?
I do find the built-in browser history is sufficient for _my_ needs, in that I mostly want a super-fadt autocomplete of certain hot items. Everything else that I know I want to revisit and find again I've bookmarked, but I don't bookmark that many things, maybe ~1 new bookmark a month.
Mostly though I realize I have focused heavily on not having clutter vs. being able to recall quickly everything I've ever found necessary or useful. It's a trade off I like, but it may not be for everyone.
> Most of the times when I've tried finding stuff in (Firefox) history, I wasn't able to. Unless it's in the last week or so.
I mentioned this below, but check to see what your history limits are in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372). It's possible if you do enough browsing that you might have trouble finding older pages because they're not there anymore.
I'm not sure what the best mitigation is for that, I've kind of accepted that history for Firefox is short-term, not long-term. It might be possible to rig up a webextension to save history more permanently, but I suspect it would need to do native messaging I think to do that, and at that point maybe it's better to just do regular copies of the SQLite database.
Relying on Firefox history less also has the kind of minor advantage of allowing you to be more aggressive about cleaning it yourself, which can have a noticeable performance impact in some cases.
I stopped using persistent browser history because I realized without it I become more diligent at bookmarking pages. Deliberately bookmarked pages are alot less clutter than my entire browsing history, so with my address bar only searching my bookmarks and current session's history, it's easier for me to find what I'm looking for. It results in smaller haystacks for my needles to get lost in. I loath using general purpose search engines to pull up pages when I already know what page I'm trying to get to, so I bookmark any page I think I'll care about in the future.
> because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
I find that browser windows are much easier to manage than tabs and make it possible to see more than one site at a time as well as have different sites/pages sized differently. If I'm doing heavy web research, I'll typically have many browser instances, each with three or four tabs.
> in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search.
So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it. Unbelievably it's not permanent.
This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure out why nothing was coming up in my history searches. Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?"
There is a way to set up recurring database backups manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite browser across multiple backups in order to search.
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Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember where a document is (although they serve that purpose as well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's not really a conscious choice.
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In support of your comment though, being able to just stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step between "leave everything open" and "categorize and organize everything you're looking at and save what you need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text file and write some notes at the top about what I was working on.
Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20 of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be free of the clutter, but if you really need to find everything, you know it's in a static text file that you can grep through at any time and that you know the browser won't do anything shifty with in the background.
[0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.
If your advice to someone struggling to stay organized is "be organized", you probably don't have much experience with ADHD or disorganization problems.
If you say "just" then you're trying to justify it without effort. Most of the people I interact with have ADHD and yes it's annoying as fuck but I don't fault them or blame them when they communicate in good faith. Using "just" to justify it means it's bad faith.
You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
> If you say "just" then you're trying to justify it without effort
This is an interestingly narrow take on what is a pretty common broadly used phrase with multiple meanings. If you're familiar with people with ADHD, you should realize that ADHD isn't something you can "just" choose to ignore or decide not to be affected by. Executive dysfunction isn't something you get to opt out of.
That knowledge should clue you in that when I use the word "just" in this context that I'm not dismissing anything or treating ADHD like a joke or using it as an excuse to be lazy. Particularly given that I immediately follow up that usage by talking about practical strategies and techniques I've developed to try and mitigate the outcome.
My point with the word "just" is that there isn't some complicated reasoning going on in my head for why it's good for me to have 1000 tabs open, in the same way that it's not some kind of life strategy that I forget to eat when I'm hyperfixated. It's not a workflow or a decision that I've made about my life, it's just a consequence of ADHD.
> you're trying to justify it
Having a lot of tabs open doesn't need to be justified. It's not a moral failing. I don't need an excuse for having a lot of tabs open because it's not behavior that needs to be excused.
The only reason to mitigate it is because mitigating it makes my individual life better. It's not really relevant whether you or anyone else approves beyond that. I'm not trying to justify anything because there is nothing about the number of browser tabs a person has open that needs to be justified or condemned. Opening a browser tab is a morally neutral act.
I replied to a comment that was curious about why someone might have that many tabs open: was it easier to work that way? Is there some browser config that makes 1000s of tabs more efficient than bookmarks? No, the cause is just ADHD.
> You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
??? I genuinely have no idea what you're suggesting or getting at here. People who open too many (?) tabs shouldn't be using browsers? What does this mean?
Given that you are saying you're familiar with ADHD, I know you're definitely not suggesting that the solution is to just choose not to open a lot of tabs in the first place. Because you know what executive dysfunction and impulsivity is and you're familiar with how people with ADHD operate, and so I know that you wouldn't make such a pointless or useless suggestion. But I'm at a loss for what you're actually trying to convey then.
Agreed, but once I switched to vertical tabs (via Sidebery with Firefox), it is WAY more manageable. Multiple tab spaces, named groupings, and a scrollable view that doesn't crowd and shorten names make it great for having many items in there with little downside.
If I'm still thinking about something and there is a related tab for it, it stays open. When researching/debugging/developing things, I usually end up with tangents, tries, multiple things to read/try and so on, so naturally, having a tree to represent my thoughts and my tabs makes sense.
I use Simple Tab Groups in addition to Tree Style Tabs. Simple Tab Groups allows you to show tabs from only one group.
So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are still there when I want to next look at them.
> I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...
Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs.
The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of diffs to check where someone messed up in the past.
And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube.
A dozen tabs easily.
Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get multiples of that.
A bunch is reasonable but I’ve seen people here on HN claim to have multiple windows with thousand of tabs on them. That is beyond comprehension for me but if it works for them that’s awesome.
One thing I've noticed since I started using Sideberry extension (a different/better take on Tree Style Tabs) is that after a day or two, the whole tab panel I separated specifically for HN tends to accumulate 100+ tabs. Having them laid out vertically in tiny font makes this apparent in a way that the regular tab bar doesn't.
Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If I realize I have a lot of HN tabs open, right-click and close the entire pane". That's how I know I'm clocking about 100 tabs per two days on HN alone.
Also, Sideberry changed my tab hoarding habit in a way that still results in keeping hundreds of tabs, but using them in much more sensible way. I keep them arranged in trees stemming from topical groups on high-level panels, and trim or kill as they're no longer useful. Most of those tabs are unloaded anyway, but the interface works as excellent short-term (days to weeks, sometimes a few months) bookmarking system - and I don't lose tabs anymore (as in knowing the tab is there somewhere, but not being able to find it in the vast sea of other tabs).
Except for the annoying interaction (I think) with "open new tabs next to current tab", which causes Sideberry to somehow leave behind lots of stupid empty tabs named after the page the real new tab had. I deal with it, but it's annoying.
Oh, I'm yet to hit that problem. My current annoyance is that sometimes it gets confused after Firefox restarts, and I end up with a flat dump of tabs + an unending spam of those tiny warning popups at the bottom of its UI. The few times that happened, I ended up restarting Firefox again to stop the warnings, and then rearranging the flat list of tabs into groups and panels I want them to be in. Fortunately, it's not that big of a chore.
I switched to Sidebery a couple of months ago, and I find that it's somewhat better at restoring trees (though that could just be luck). I feel it's a bit more responsive, but these days I trim my tabs a bit more aggresive than I used to so my TST memories are somewhat biased.
I was surprised at how decent it converted TST tabs, but I can't remember how low my bar was; maybe try a new profile?
One thing I'm finding really nice in Sidebery though that TST can't do, is that I can create a parent node that is not attached to a specific page (via grouping).
Panels I'm undecided on. They seem useful, but they also seem like a bandaid over window management tools. One problem I'm having is that they don't restore, and all the tabs go back to the main panel. That may be some setting I toggled though.
Honestly, I don't remember. A year ago when I was considering going back to vertical tabs, I read a bunch of discussion thread and articles, and got the impression Sideberry might be better. Tried it, and it resonates with me - unlike TST, which I tried and quickly abandoned several times over the year.
Can't really point to any concrete issue, other than I have a distinct feeling Sideberry is much faster/lighter, and feels more like part of Firefox vs. some bunch of JS faking an UI on top of it. Sorry I can't give you a more objective comparison. I did find this though:
I'm convinced that a significant proportion of people today don't use bookmarks and have never leveraged their power because they grew up with tabs and never bothered to explore their other options for organizing websites.
You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift ideas that you won't close because you don't want to forget about them can be saved in a folder named gift ideas so the next time you need them you have them, without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU cycles!
There were extensions for it more than a decade ago already, but these days it is indeed the regular out-of-box behavior (though Chrome got it only a few months ago IIRC).
Nah, I grew up with bookmarks and was constantly annoyed at the terrible UI for them and then when tabs got good enough I stopped using bookmarks since the default bookmarks UI is terrible.
For me I just type titles or word back into the browser bar and Firefox searches history. How are you searching/navigating to find the right tab of several hundred to go back to that tab?
Too many sites have useless titles, or URLs that if you go back to you don't get to the same state you had when you closed the window. So, I find that history is for the most part useless. Sometimes it works - but not reliably.
I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100 open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify tabs by their tree structures (parents, children, siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the tabs are arranged vertically.
Bookmarks are long-term useful things to keep saved, and don't serve the same purpose as these open tabs.
As for history, imagine you're researching a topic and have gone through fifteen search results, decided three of them were relevant, and closed the others. Your history is polluted with all fifteen, whereas this tab search will directly return you these most relevant pages only.
I switched about a year ago as well, partially because of performance pains but also because I tried to leave as many google products behind as I could for privacy reasons. I have not been disappointed so far... There are a few plugins I miss on Chrome but nothing I couldn't live without or find an acceptable alternative.
I switched to Orion[0] as a test, discovered the awesomeness of superbly integrated, native, tree style tabs, and now I'm stuck with this browser where sites I need for work are half broken.
I tried Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension, but it's not nearly as good :(
On firefox you can also use sidebery. If I recall correctly it worked decently well. Currently I'm using Arc which performs well enough for my use cases, although being locked into chromium kinda sucks.
Tree style tabs along with changing the CSS to remove the tabs from the top of the screen has been a game changer for me. Back when I had an M1 macbook air, it was the difference between everything feeling cluttered to feeling like a real laptop screen.
Edge has had vertical tabs with tab groups natively for a couple years now. It also has a nice Reader mode, good text-to-speech, and a screenshot tool built in. And it supports uBlock Origin as an add on.
Yeah, that's not the same, or even functionally close. Just a superficial resemblance. The value of tree style tabs is that you don't manually organize anything, and the tabs are nested arbitrarily deep so that you literally end up with a hierarchical tree of tabs that shows you the logical view of your browsing history with no manual input on your part. (Note the comparison to edge has been made before, which is why I specifically said tree-style tabs, not vertical tabs.)
Unfortunately due to limitations of chrome's extension model, there is no way to have a built-in extension sidebar like on firefox. I just manually position the tab window next to the browser window and it's fine. The window sizes are remembered and so it's really a non-issue.
I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.