Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

by freediver • 4 years ago

140 108 4 years ago

account-5• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what this is offering over normal Firefox other than not having to turn off telemetry, install ublock ( and the other mentioned add-ons), and making use of user.js myself?

Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".

dartharva• 4 years ago

"Hyper minimalistic UI"

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

I'm glad to see someone still has the courage to work on browsers - which is increasingly declared "infeasible". Well done.

We have been moving further away from privacy and towards

But sorry, I literally stopped reading at that point.

The only feature that people want and need from browsers, and the only reason to even glance twice at yet another Firefox fork is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing.

There is enormous scope here to add value - adding client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration.

How about starting with a browser that can remember your privacy settings, instead of silently "updating" and defaulting back to the worst possible settings as Firefox does? Having the latest (probably broken and more privacy invasive) presentation features would be very low on my list.

WithinReason• 4 years ago

Pressing F11 in Firefox is even more minimalistic

trickypr6• 4 years ago

Hi, I am a dev on Pulse Browser. I want to clarify our current development direction (I haven't significant updated the website recently). We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster than Firefox is willing to, along with providing sane defaults.

For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you could technically achieve this via patching `omni.ja`, you would need to repatch it every update. At that point, it might as well be a custom browser.

Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled, but it should be disabled now (or whenever Cloudflare invalidates your cache).

If you want further reading into some of the specific parts of our code that we are putting most of our effort into, here are some links: - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/blob/alpha/src/brow... - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/tree/alpha/src/brow...

csande17• 4 years ago

We have been moving further away from privacy [...]

I appreciate your honesty, but hearing this was enough for me to file your project into the "not touching with a ten-foot pole" bucket alongside the likes of Wave Browser.

GeckoEidechse2• 4 years ago

Currently the 3rd most requested feature on Mozilla Connect is native vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs-li...

Any chance we could see something like this in Pulse Browser or is that something that just requires touching too much of the underlying code base to be viable? ^^

enriquto• 4 years ago

Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled,

How do you "accidentally" enable such user-hostile tracking? This gives quite a bad image of the site and the associated project. Will you "accidentally" enable telemetry as well on some future versions of Pulse?

anuragvohraec• 4 years ago

kudos, we do need new browsers. Appreciate you guys putting efforts. Hope you guys succeed in your endeavor.

webmobdev• 4 years ago

I appreciate your initiative on creating a fork of Firefox and trying to innovate on it. The following criticism of the project is well intentioned, even if harsh:

We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster

That is fine but what have you done on the Privacy aspect? I tried out your alpha and immediately on startup it tries to connect to location.services.mozilla.com . So I disabled geolocation, and it still insists on connecting to Mozilla. So I check settings to see if there is an option to disable checking for updates, but there is no such option. If you want me to create config or policy files, I don't see how your browser is making things any easier than Firefox. And hence my question - what privacy features have you actually incorporated or enabled in Pulse Browser?

(Note: I am not questioning your rationale of the default settings, which is necessary for the average user, but the lack of ease for power users to customise any feature. Please look into how Pale Moon / White Star and Orion browsers ensure that disabling phoning home features in settings actually means that the browser will not make any automatic network connections on startups - they are the only 2 browsers that do this, and thus show that they genuinely respect their users.)

Otherwise, your whole project is just a browser extension bundled with the browser. Nevertheless, a good effort. You might find this resource useful for your project - https://sammacbeth.eu/blog/2020/12/27/firefox-fork.html

forgotmypw172• 4 years ago

If you think you've turned off all "telemetry" spyware in a Firefox build, you're probably wrong.

mezobeli• 4 years ago

Librewolf?

rjzzleep3• 4 years ago

This isn't so much a fork rather than a firefox bundle with some extensions and tweaks or am I wrong? In which it would be quite deceptive in my opinion.

trickypr6• 4 years ago

Our website is a touch (read very) out of date. To clarify, we are working on newer features, like the sidebar tabs. Currently, it is a combination of a tech demo and a set of personal preferences (features, extensions, preferences) that I and the other developer would prefer. If you have ideas for new features, I am interested to hear them.

rjzzleep3• 4 years ago

I don't really mind it, you can do whatever you want. I just have a problem with the choice of the word fork in this context, but I guess technically you're not wrong per se. Although it's more a fork of that dot browser build than of firefox itself, is that correct?

Existenceblinks3• 4 years ago

Firefox is already fast in a lot of ways. For example, "Recalculate Style" is dead slow on Chrome compared to firefox. I don't know how but it's night and day (over a second difference for 10k+ nodes). Maybe something to do with https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestprac...

A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable.

Edit: NVM. the tagline is "enhances focus and increases work productivity"

throwaway0asd• 4 years ago

Firefox is also faster at DOM navigation: https://jsbench.github.io/#b39045cacae8d8c4a3ec044e538533dc

You can see from that set of benchmarks (once you run them) that Chrome will top out at around 45 million ops/s in the fastest cases.

In Firefox the top cases are a stress test of memory access speed. My old desktop with DDR3 reports numbers like 850 million ops/s while my newer laptop (4 years old) with DDR4 memory, both otherwise slower, reports something around 1.2 billion ops/s. Years ago when I discovered those benchmarks I remembered other users reporting as high as 5 billion ops/s.

I would be curious what somebody reports now with fast DDR5 memory.

Existenceblinks3• 4 years ago

Yeah, as a developer it sucks that most users don't get the best perf we offer because they happened to use to the slower one.

hnlmorg2• 4 years ago

A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable.

I don’t want an internet dominated by only one web browser’s rendering engine. Not ever again thank you.

Existenceblinks3• 4 years ago

I don't want too. But I think in shoes of others. Clearly we want them to not want to too but the market share speaks itself.

autoexec• 4 years ago

A better firefox would be a better Chrome

I don't like the idea of my web browser being owned by Google or anyone else who made their fortune collecting people's personal data to use against them.

A better firefox would be a firefox that cared a bit more about people's privacy by default, but as long they keep caring enough to let me disable what I don't like I'll happily stick with firefox as it is.

shmerl• 4 years ago

What would be cool to see is Vulkan based WebRender and Servo based browser.

happymellon2• 4 years ago

What would be cool, is to see built in profile switching.

Yoric• 4 years ago

`firefox -P` with a better UI?

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

Will it keep up with security patches?

trickypr6• 4 years ago

We try to keep it up to date with the latest version of Firefox. Currently it is bound to 105.0.1 but we will soon be on 106.0.5 (once PR#135 merges).

JonathanBeuys• 4 years ago

What I miss most in FireFox is better multiline script support in the dev console.

The current solution to copy the whole script into the console every time you run it is pretty cumbersome.

Also, when you opened the script from a file, ctrl+save should let you save it back with the same name. Not suggesting a name like "console-input-2022-11-13_9-36-47.js" every time.

Zekio• 4 years ago

i am almost positive i have used it recently when did it get removed?

Edit I am an idiot you said better not removed...

talkingtab• 4 years ago

I would like to understand a bit more about this project. It is a fork of an open source git repository. It removes some features. There is some discussion in the comments about "exploring features". Are you presenting this as something for people to play with - download and throw away - or as something to depend on and use? "Pulse Browser" leads me to think the latter, but "experimental Firefox Fork", the former.

trickypr6• 4 years ago

Currently it is in the "tech demo" phase. The only people I would recommend using this are people willing to contribute in some form. I would not recommend it as a daily driver hence the "alpha" tag on all the builds.

To be honest, the only part that I would recommend is our tooling that we use for soft-forking Firefox/Gecko, which is where we have the most outside testers and where I am focusing most of my upstream (mozilla-centeral) patches to improving.

zichy• 4 years ago

What does "increases work productivity" even mean? Is this a problem with the original Firefox?

jonas-w• 4 years ago

If firefox starts to add more and more stuff no one wants to use, yes.

itake2• 4 years ago

How fast does this get updated when Mozilla releases a 0day patch?

sys42590• 4 years ago

That's a very good question.

Lack of automated and timely updates made me uninstall LibreWolf pretty quickly from my Windows boxes.

I won't touch this fork if its more hassle to keep secure than vanilla Firefox.

pressjumpdev2• 4 years ago

Hey, Pulse dev here. We try to keep up with updates regularly (1 week to 2 weeks if we are busy). In the case of an exploit or critical update we try to do it fast as possible.

itake2• 4 years ago

How automatic are updates? Will it warn me when I am out of date and can update itself (e.g. clicking a button, not going back to the home page and needing to DL and install each version)?

layer82• 4 years ago

It’s explicitly marked as an experimental fork.

brigandish4• 4 years ago

Fix the terrible history page and I'll switch because it'll tell me that the dev team is prioritising the right things, existing, basic features over new, probably unwanted ones.

For a laugh, check out this bug[1] for the history page, extant since Firefox 11!, that means deletion is incredibly slow and tiresome. What makes me laugh even more is that history is stored in a SQLite database, meaning that deletion should be very easy and quick but they've decided to create some horrible extraction over the top that inevitably uses Javascript of some sort.

Just delete the stuff and refresh the page. Or don't, inform the user to close and reopen it themself, it would still be an improvement by a long way. Jesus wept, I know about Chesterton's Fence but how hard can this really be?

As this comment by a team committer shows, the direction of the product is wrongheaded and tells me all I need to know about why FF has fallen so far behind Chrome in market share:

We understand this is still an issue, and we recognise that it is a pain point for people who do hit it. However, it likely involves a significant amount of non-trivial work to fix. At the moment our focus is on improving other areas of Firefox, and we don't have the time available to dedicate to this.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643

amadeuspagel2• 4 years ago

Javascript? In my browser? It's more likely then you think.

brigandish4• 4 years ago

Pray tell why Javascript should be involved in the deletion of history entries from a SQLite database in an app distributed as a binary that is largely written in Rust.

I know the answer, because it's UI update code. I don't fucking care about the fancy UI updates, delete the entries and get out of my way. Javascript in most websites is obnoxious enough, in a browser it had better be good or it's beyond obnoxious, much like your reply.

dareiff• 4 years ago

Oddly enough, selective history deleting is absolutely awful in Safari (16.*?) as well.

brigandish4• 4 years ago

Like bookmarks, history is an underrated and under-served feature.

Tade0• 4 years ago

This appears to be a case of something that I've known as "the BBBB problem" - should we optimise algorithms that will rarely be used in a way that makes computation time explode?

I mean, who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?

I don't remember who named it like that, but the associated anecdote was about typing "BBBB" somewhere in Excel(I think it was the function search input), and how unlikely it was to ever happen.

Personally I've pasted the wrong thing into search bars more than once and they exhibit a range of behaviours.

mahdi7d1• 4 years ago

"who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?" Me too. When I read the first guy's comment I was like "Goddam it's not just me"

brigandish4• 4 years ago

I use the example as the opposite of a canary in a coalmine, a good omen, some way to divine good attitude and thus, good things to come. If I wanted to point to areas where Mozilla have clearly wasted effort that would be easy enough, the comments and submissions to HN are littered with them. The point is that there are basic functions in the browser that are ignored while these other - shall we call them debacles, because that's what they tend to end up as - are released and pilloried or ignored.

Hence, to see something like this be fixed would be a sign that developer time is going into the core product. It could be anything else more fundamental than whatever I've seen announced by Mozilla lately.

chrismorgan• 4 years ago

I mean, who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?

I’ve often done it to clear out useless repetitive history entries that are just clogging up results when typing in the address/search bar. Ideally it would simply not make entries for some kinds of redirects and I could define rules of URLs to exclude, but in the absence of that I might just go through once or twice a year and delete a few of the biggest repetitive patterns. And how slow it’s been for the last decade has been rather frustrating at times. I just tried deleting a couple of thousand (I use Nightly, where a fix apparently landed last week) and it took half a second, which is much more relaxing than the ten or twenty seconds of full-blocking CPU thrashing that it used to be.

chlorion• 4 years ago

I do understand what you mean, and in general I agree, but in this specific example making it faster doesn't require "optimizing" anything! If I am understanding correctly the "naive" algorithm here is the fast one, so it takes more effort to make it slow than it does to make it fast.

trickypr6• 4 years ago

Mozilla has landed a partial fix for this[1], which is currently on the nightly branch and should be available with 108.

[1] https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/04e6abff2792

amadeuspagel2• 4 years ago

People constantly whine about chromes monopoly on HN.

When someone makes a blink-based browser, they whine about blinks monopoly.

When someone forks firefox ...

chironjit4• 4 years ago

Hey, just wanted to say great work. I'm excited for innovation of a non-chrome engine and am gonna give it a try.

My 2 biggest beef with Firefox is website compatibility and dead tabs.

For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites.

Sometimes, websites explicitly block non Chrome browsers too.

So if I had to request a feature, this would be it.

For the second item, I haven't been really able to pin it down. But I've seen this on both Android and Linux version. A tab sometimes goes dead, that it it doesn't refresh or basically doesn't respond when typing a new address. The solution has been to just close the tab and start a new one.

Will give it a try and provide more feedback

BiteCode_dev4• 4 years ago

Don't ask a browser vendor to fix websites in 2022. We know that it's rarely a problem with the browser, and mostly devs that decided (or been told) to do a chrome only website.

We did it once with IE, don't fall in that trap again.

chironjit4• 4 years ago

Haha, I don't necessarily disagree with you on this..

My only view on this is it would be nice to have a general chrome compatibility switch. I've not accounted for the feasibility of this from a technical or commercial perspective, so I can't advocate for it beyond a nice to have feature.

_fat_santa• 4 years ago

It's even worse than that. You could build a site "just for chrome", only test on Chrome and still it should just work with Firefox. The sites blocking Firefox are doing so explicitly, because the site would work otherwise.

kevingadd• 4 years ago

#2 sounds like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772975 , maybe comment about your experience

worble• 4 years ago

For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites.

People often say this but rarely give examples, do you have some? Explicitly listing the sites would be much better feedback that might actually lead the problems being solved.

GeckoEidechse2• 4 years ago

Just go to about:compat in Firefox and you can see them. Most of them are simple UA locks but some require more advanced logic.

chironjit4• 4 years ago

I've learnt to sorta live it and workaround it but one egregious example was a passport renewal site for a (non US) country whose image uploading function failed silently on image upload.

Repeated the process multiple times for an hour until it occurred to me to just try a chrome-based browser. Worked fine after that.

I've run into quite a few crypto-related sites that break in weird ways when interacting with wallets / etc. The relative frequency of these issues on crypto sites are really the most disappointing - so much for decentralisation, anti-monopoly, etc, etc

Not keen to name and shame in this thread but my primary worry is that it will drive away more people from Firefox.

gorhill• 4 years ago

There is a "Report site issue..." entry in Firefox's hamburger menu, under "Help", which leads to <https://webcompat.com/issues/new>. This is really the best way to help Firefox with compatibility issues, i.e. providing specific information which can be acted upon.

TexanFeller• 4 years ago

certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome

Despite most web devs only really supporting and testing in Chrome, aside from Google sites which deliberately sabotage FF compatibility, I find the opposite to be true more frequently. I can't count the number of times a site had not been working for my wife in Chrome and I tell her "try it in FF", and it works. I'm a full time FF user at home and have basically zero compatibility issues. I only use Chrome at work because of a few poorly implemented mandatory tools that exclude FF.

jacooper2• 4 years ago

I personay think that even though Google controls chromium, its simple the best web engine out there.

Instead of working on an objectively worse engine, try to influence chromium without google, or maybe even create a complete fork.

BiteCode_dev4• 4 years ago

A monoculture is fragile and will be prone to abuses.

jacooper2• 4 years ago

Personally*

BiteCode_dev4• 4 years ago

Great news!

Wish you well. Do you have a donation link?

Since everyone is sharing their xmas list, here is mind:

- containers builtin and improved

- torrent download built in

- forget site built in

- tab group buit in

- private tab instead of private window, like in portable ff

- restore form built in

- profile switcher built in

toastal4• 4 years ago

Reasons LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is more interesting:

• more mature • more installation options • hosted on an open-core forge, GitLab, instead of a proprietary, closed-source one, GitHub • open-source communications preferred, Matrix/Gitter, instead of proprietary, closed-source communications, Discord • website has a lot more information

solarkraft7• 4 years ago

Last time I checked it was incompatible with most half-advanced JavaScript apps by default. Not what I'm looking for.

INeedMoreRam• 4 years ago

So what is your preferred browser?

toastal4• 4 years ago

'Incompatible' is one way to put it. Privacy and security is set to the most restrictive by defaults Firefox offers (more in line with Tor) and users are supposed to opt into every feature that may compromise those ideals. Honestly it's helped me in some cases: spoofing its user agent, I can actually use Slack in a tab and if I disable it Slack will report I'm using an unsupported browser and block access to the chat.

pluc• 4 years ago

Plenty of obscure alternatives: LibreWolf, IceWeasel, IceCat, WaterFox, PaleMoon or just ArkenFox.

toastal4• 4 years ago

Many of these aren't trying to advertise as particularly private with uBlock built-in as a feature.

2Gkashmiri2• 4 years ago

where is the brave sympathizers who say "forking firefox is pita so the team decided to use chromium"...

if these people, librewolf people can fork and use firefox, why can't brave? oh so they have problems with firefox ideologically while helping google be the monopoly is fine. okay

voidz• 4 years ago

I think Google is preventing the monopoly themselves, by throwing megabucks ($450M per year) towards Mozilla's development of Firefox.

2Gkashmiri2• 4 years ago

nope. all chromium derivates have an option to switch ti firefox but they dont

forgotmypw172• 4 years ago

My critique:

I had to deal with about 10 clicks worth of modal dialogs before actually being able to use the browser.

Distracting home screen which took about 5-7 highly focused clicks to turn off.

Keeps prompting me to become default browser even after I say no.

Does not allow me to set my own search engine.

I think this browser needs a lot of work to live up to its claims of "enhances focus" and "hyper minimalistic".

solarkraft7• 4 years ago

Yes! We need a de-Mozilla-ed Firefox Fork. Remove the VPN ads, Pocket and whatever other crap they're trying to push.

But don't make the mistake of the other Forks of disabling almost every modern web technology. Don't rip out WebRTC. Keep JS on. Keep it usable by default.

mxuribe4• 4 years ago

On the github page (https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser) under "Features", it cites "QR Code Generator". I'm puzzled by this feature - both for bare curiosity, but also for a browser that is intended to be somewhat minimalist. Does someone know what the use-case would be for this feature? (Not knocking this feature, just curious.)

enragedcacti• 4 years ago

I would guess its to replace or augment the "Send Tab to Device" functionality of stock Firefox so that the user can easily get the same page onto their phone or other device without a Mozilla account.

mxuribe4• 4 years ago

Ah-ha, ok, makes sense. Thanks!

rjzzleep3• 4 years ago

Probably to share URLs quickly with a mobile device without needing to sync things?

mxuribe4• 4 years ago

Yeah, makes sense. Thanks!

pressjumpdev2• 4 years ago

Hey pulse dev here, actually the guy who inserted QR Code Generator xd. There were suggestions around adding a qr generator to the browser for sharing urls irl easily. This was also something that replaced our emoji picker as it was hard to maintain, unoptimized and we deemed this more productive.

mxuribe4• 4 years ago

Thanks for confirming! And yep, makes sense as a url sharing mechanism. Cheers, and good luck with this browser; the more diversity in the browser world, the better!

EliasWatson• 4 years ago

It's a reliable way to send links to almost any device with a camera.

Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

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