this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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I’ve never (almost?) used chrome as main for the past 15+ years
but he’ll, the last years updates are more and more unstable. Tab and browser crashes are to be expected multiple times per week (ok browser crash maybe once per week)
Also I actually miss WebUSB, WebBluetooth (I work with embedded as a hobby and it’s very convenient) and background blur (nobody wants to allow camera blur in ff, especially linux)
For me Firefox haven't crashed once in a year or more, even though I'm a heavy user: using it every day for multiple hours as a "tab hoarder", with quite a few addons.
I also rarely restart it, as I don't turn off my computer completely, so the Firefox process is usually as old as the time of last system reboot.
I think you may have ran into a rare bug, that has got persisted in your browser profile.
You may create a new browser profile (e.g. on the about:profiles page) and set your things up there, and most likely it'll be stable.
I think there's also a "refresh Firefox" button somewhere where average people would look for it, but I don't know where it is. But be aware that this will delete everything in Firefox, where's if you create a new profile, the new profile will start with a clean slate and you can switch back and forth between the old one if you find out you need something from there (e.g. old passwords that you haven't transferred, a specific about:config setting if you use those, addon settings, ...), or even have them open at the same time.
there’s a very high chance that something’s off with my profile but deleting my profile is not worth it (yet?)
Losing my history isn’t something I take lightly - at all
Tell you the truth I’m just “harvesting” anger to fix the fucking bug and fix it “properly”. I hope
About the other points.
I see your point, personally I prefer WebUsb, WebBluetooth and such to be completely missing, so it's much less likely that a bug allows access to these to a site.
Bluring camera background seems to me very specific to webcams, and even if chromium based browsers will do it for you, I think you are better off with running OBS and it's virtual webcam functionality, as it has been made for that purpose (video processing), and it can do much more if you want (including cropping, ways to improve video quality, or even do greenboxing). Introducing background bluring to the browser would mean more requests to add this or that effect (even if it should actually be the task of the web app), and I think it's hard to maintain even a single such effect (that does not blur everything, but only certain parts of the image) if your devs don't have extensive experience in video processing. This would be a feature that if introduced, either would break once and stay that way for quite some time, or would take significant development resources to find the problem and keep it working.
I knooooooow, my feeling for WebUSB/whatever are completely love/hate. I come from a security background (and hobby) but the alternative to WebUSB is horrible and implementation specific - you need to download the binary, install the correct version of the X programmer and make it kiss your debugger. It’s bad.
Also I just don’t wanna open chrom* - I do but I’d like to tell a huge fuck off
About camera blur: What I wanted to point out is the lack of some “exotic” features that firefox lacks. the blur implementation is not in chrome but in each web app - means there’s the required api to do that
But it’s niche, I don’t care that much. there’s also a py project on gh that does exactly that: blur your background and expose a fake cam. It’s not “production ready” but it’s ok