treestyletab VS uBlock

TreeStyleTabs author lists some more elaborate css [1].

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Addressing grandparent's comment regarding lack of tab grouping, I made a custom stylesheet for TST that somewhat tries to tackle this:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/discussions/3369

I was really enjoying tree tabs and panels of the Arc browser [0] but decided to rollback to firefox so I could have something cross platform. Sidebery lets me do nested tab groups, tab panels, plus its got my bookmarks as a panel too. Performance so far is really good, with ~50 tabs anyway.

Only trouble is I had to go to relatively great lengths to hide my horizontal tabs: enable userChrome stylesheets, go to about:support to find my Profile folder, create a chrome folder, create a userChrome.css file and paste contents from [1], and restart. So now I have only the side bar of tree tabs, and a hot key to hide/show. Screencap attached [2]

[0] https://arc.net/

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

[2] https://coltenj.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Screenshot-20...

Out of the box Tree Style Tabs is not very good, due to decisions made by Firefox that are beyond its control.

Enabling the desires behavior likely requires quite a few steps beyond just installing the extension.

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Originally, Firefox had a dropdown menu that allowed the user to choose whether tabs were on the top, bottom, left, or right.

This has been an annoying trend with Firefox for some time. They take the default, expected functionality, marginalize it while saying "Users who prefer the old way can enable it in a setting / extension" and then the setting gets deprecated or the extension gets broken by Firefox.

See also: "Classic Theme Restorer".

I don't really think anyone is copying anyone here. This is a popular feature for browsers that has been around for over a decade.

Orion[1] is another recent MacOS browser that released before Arc in 2021 and has vertical tabs. Edge had vertical tabs as an experiment back in 2020[2] and is full feature now. Vivaldi has had vertical tabs since 2015[3]. It might not count since it's not built in, but Firefox has had vertical tab extensions since 2007[4].

[1]https://browser.kagi.com/

[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-verti...

[3]https://www.maketecheasier.com/vertical-tabs-browsers/

[4]https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/graphs/contributors

Use treestyletab

If you need further help with this, use the official Tree Style Tab forum or look for solutions on /r/FirefoxCSS.

Check out uBlock Origin's per site switches [1]

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.

I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Or if on mobile, it is well worth it to look up adblock options for the browser you use.

What are the compelling advantages of Chrome nowadays?

Chrome is working to limit the capabilities of ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

Whereas a compelling advantage of Firefox is that uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Advertising networks have often been vectors for malware. Using an ad blocker is an important security measure. Even the FBI recommends ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624

> It allows for 30,000 dynamic rules

That is not what we mean by dynamic filters. From https://developer.chrome.com/blog/improvements-to-content-fi...

> However, to support more frequent updates and user-defined rules, extensions can add rules dynamically too, without their developers having to upload a new version of the extension to the Chrome Web Store.

What Chrome is talking about is the ability to specify rules at runtime. What critics of Manifest V3 are talking about is not the ability to dynamically add rules (although that can be an issue), it is the ability to add dynamic rules -- ie rules that analyze and rewrite requests in the style of the blockingWebRequest permission.

It's a little deceptive to claim that the concerns here are outdated and to point to vague terminology that sounds like it's correcting the problem, but on actual inspection turns out to be entirely separate functionality from what the GP was talking about.

> Giving this ability to extensions can slow down the browser for the user. These ads can still be blocked through other means.

This is the debate; most of the adblocking community disagrees with this assertion. uBO maintains a list of some common features that are already not possible to support in Chrome ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... ) and has written about features that are not able to be supported via Chrome's current V3 API ( https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... ). Of particular note are filtering for large media elements (I use this a lot on mobile Firefox, it's great for reducing page size), and top-level filtering of domains/fonts.

> "Its happened before"

> That's not an argument

It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.

> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt

That would be agreeing with the article, unless I understand what you mean.

> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.

In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.

> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?

The points made in the article are:

* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company

* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards

* It’s fast and has a nice user interface

Onto which I'd add:

* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so when Manifest V3 rolls out

* Allows more customization of interface and home page

* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect search revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)

Advertising networks are vectors for malware:

https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/malvertising

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

So if you're concerned about security then you want the browser with the best ad blocker.

uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...