between the actual monopolies like microsoft (edge is a monopoly, and the browser is not a good idea to use because it still has every problem that it did when it was called internet explorer) and very free solutions like well-- making your own with python and webkit (i know, even mentioning webkit weakens the argument a bit-- try to stay with me though)

there are companies that come along and try to make these things more monopolistic. red hats ceo has talked about the advantage and strategy around this very thing (again, steve litt talks about this a lot.) red hat is the biggest example. microsoft is one-- the more it "loves linux" the more this will happen. mozilla is doing this-- probably not because its in their nature to do so, but because (like when red hat coders changed the culture at freedesktop) people go work for mozilla and make it less like a non-profit and more like a business.

business isnt the problem, money isnt the problem (imo) though greed and monopoly are. so a few paragraphs arent enough to prove what you probably already grasp so why explain it here... my point is simply that theres is a cultural shift in so many of these things we were able to rely on-- and now they are all less reliable, and we keep scrambling to find replacements like many of us did in the days when we used windows. "oh! i hate the new explorer, heres a replacement file manager, its 'freeware' and theres 'no nags'" remember those days?

only now its happening in the free software world-- nag windows (slightly different, but still familiar...) about plugins we like, being told what init we are going to use and basically "suck it up or gtfo" and turning nicely de-coupled components into tangles of overengineered nonsense.

this isnt just a "design philosophy" but the way that corporations create products they control. and while free software has a lot of immunity to that, a sort of auto-immune design takeover is slowly creeping into our browsers, inits, hardware management, power management, disk management, file open dialogs, scroll windows, browser plugin managers, file mounting (android gvfs) printing (avahi networking) sound (pulse coupled with browsing and skype)

what a mess!

this is neither a technical thing nor is it a big secret conspiracy. its a very open takeover of all our mainstream software by companies whose advertising has valentines hearts, and whose employees (l5t) call us 4-letter words and neckbeards.

but of course... we were talking about browsers. and whats happened to our browsers is-- this cultural (not technical) problem. lisi says we should say thank you and be grateful for the volunteers.

if i come water your garden and everything dies and i say "its your fault for not using roundup-resistant flowers, i was using an enterprise garden watering solution, youre using some kind of old-fashioned organic stuff which is fine but it doesnt scale" then youre going to sue me, right?

except in this instance, we let them in. we told them to do the watering. and now we are stuck with the results (three years running.) "thank you" is nice, but we got a little more than we bargained for.

even if we win (we probably will) did anybody notice that corporations still set free software back several years or longer?

we got too lax. so taking lisis advice: thank you microsoft lobbyists, thank you sco, thank you linus and open source initiative, thank you red hat and thank you suse for showing us how much we stopped doing what we should have done to prevent this.

now we fix it. i really do mean "we," because if users had refused this stuff all along, the developers would not be able to justify most of it. i have developed things, but one of the problems remaning is we have to fix their problems their way-- no, we can fix things however we please. we didnt trade our choices, we traded the maintainence of an ecosystem we controlled for the maintainence of an ecosystem that benefits large corporations instead. oops.

the next time someone tells you "open source" is more reasonable than free software, they were advocating this all along-- just sit back and let enterprise make it alllllllllllll better. theyre not mutually exclusive! (yes they are. monopolies-- by definition-- are mutually exclusive. its what the word means!)

</rant>

red hat <3 linux

Pragmatically, though, Firefox is a hacky browser, despite Mozilla's aggressive blobbing and unasked-for policies (like forced extension signing).  In the event that editing xpinstall.signatures.required results in no change, I'm not sure if a guide like this would be of benefit to anyone, but it seems like it might be worth a read.

first impressions: oh no, they made it more for tablets-- all settings are lumped together on fewer, much longer, awful to navigate pages.

but the dealbreaker was firefox told me that it was stopping me from loading unsigned plugins, and actually recommended firefox-esr as a way around this. i installed esr and i was like (well its still firefox, but at least its closer-- design-wise to the sanity firefox had years ago.) i dont want mozilla telling me which plugins i can use.

advise-- responsibly (pale moon was far from responsible about it or id still be using it) but do not stop me-- its my computer, not mozillas.

let them tell you what plugins you may load, next its what websites you may visit, etc (i know, malware alerts. those are not all bad but sometimes, eh.) the user is more often the owner too-- suddenly we are designing everything for internet kiosks or what?

Please note that this configuration is best when coupled with other security and privacy addons (eg noscript), and no addon beats disabling javascript altogether (although this may be unreasonable for all users).

A note about privacy.resistFingerprinting in Quantum -- when this "privacy" feature is enabled, it also leaks default information (check yourself at browserleaks.com/javascript).  I disable this feature and use the canvasblocker plugin instead.  (Mozilla in general seems to be implementing "privacy" and "security" features at the cost of, ironically, privacy and security; tracking protection is another example, as it offloads requests to Google.  This is an unsettling trend, although understandable since, if I recall, Google is a huge donator to Mozilla.)

https://github.com/souperdoupe/crunkbon … gs/firefox

It is light, isn't it!

Quite light.  It compiles in less than a minute on my systems.  The patches are excellent too  
https://surf.suckless.org/patches/

I like it. It is light, isn't it!?!?!

Since I'm new to it, I cheated and made a desktop entry for it so that it shows in my menu, and I have it open to Startpage so that when I click on a search result, it opens it in a new window...which I need until I get the hang of everything.

Got Youtube videos working. Now I guess I need to look over the man page to see if there's anything about improving font size/rendering.

Thanks guys. This has been fun.

All things considered, though, I prefer it over pretty much every other browser.  It's sensible, lightweight, and portable.  Why is that so difficult to find in a browser these days?

I'm surprised surf isn't gaining more recognition.

The easiest way to get it running in ASCII (or Jessie) is to download its AppImage, put the AppImage file anywhere, make it executable, then make /usr/bin/firefox a link to the AppImage. Wife and I are quite conservative in our computing, but we are both very impressed with what Mozilla has accomplished and it would be painful to go back to pre-Quantum (<57) Firefox or any other browser.

The Firefox 59 AppImage (64-bit only) is available here: https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/d … 4.AppImage

Palemoon is still winning, barely. But it can't do mhtml or view pdfs like Chromium can.

You could add the extension Moon PDF Viewer for PDF viewing.