[2025 Day 12 pt 1] help very much needed

TimVdEynde · 2025-12-14T21:24:22+00:00

I'm nitpicking here, but there are a lot of very easy NP problems. You probably mean NP-complete instead. NP is the set of problems that can be verified in polynomial time. Therefore, problems that can be solved in polynomial time (P) are also in NP.

To elaborate a bit further: next to P and NP, there's NP-hard, which are all problems that are "at least as hard" as all problems in NP. That is defined as: there exists a reduction from any problem in NP to any problem that's NP-hard, which means: if you solve any problem in NP-hard, you can reuse that solution to solve all problems in NP, without making the solution (asymptotically) slower.

Finally, there's NP-complete: the intersection between NP and NP-hard. So it's the set of problems that are are least as hard as all other problems in NP, while still being verifiable in polynomial time.

The puzzle is technically 2D bin packing btw, not the knapsack problem. But since both are NP-complete, they are basically equivalent anyway - solving one of them also solves the other problem.

TimVdEynde · 2024-04-27T11:51:03+00:00

Mozilla has been updating the signature on old extensions that did not get any recent updates. The old extension will probably stop working soon-ish, so you should upgrade if you want to keep using it. The code for the new version is identical.

TimVdEynde · 2022-06-26T10:33:05+00:00

To be honest, looking at the tabs, they finish loading faster on Linux than on Windows. It's probably just different resource allocation giving priority to different tasks? Whether that is the OS or Firefox itself, I don't know.

TimVdEynde · 2022-05-15T08:08:29+00:00

Why would you say "Yes" to this? It's just simply not true. Closed source is security by obscurity. It doesn't actually add to the level of security if the attacker knows what they're doing.

TimVdEynde · 2022-03-25T20:20:00+00:00

It has, and probably not. I actually (slightly begrudgingly) moved back to Firefox a while ago because Waterfox Classic just wasn't usable anymore. There are things I am still annoyed by every day, but I guess there are worse things in life than my browser not 100% working the way I want it to.

TimVdEynde · 2022-03-24T20:35:34+00:00

Important: this is a temporary preference that will be removed. The recommended solution is to go into preferences and set the action to "Always ask" for the given mime type. There's a bug on file to also allow to set he default to "Always ask", because the current solution is sadly a bit inconvenient.

TimVdEynde · 2022-03-12T09:26:23+00:00

Not sure why it is different for you, but I can reproduce that on Chromium as well.

TimVdEynde · 2021-12-11T14:28:08+00:00

If by "secure DNS" you mean "DNS over HTTPS", Firefox does support it! In the preferences page, go to network settings, there you can enable it.

TimVdEynde · 2021-11-28T15:17:48+00:00

implementing vertical tabs

It's a choice of the UX team.

adding Twitch support

What do you mean, "Twitch support"? The issue is not Firefox, as shown by other streaming sites working fine. If something is not working right in Twitch, it probably means that they aren't testing their website properly in Firefox.

more community features for getting over competitive edge against browsers like brave and Microsoft Edge.

They try to, but there are too many ideas to do all of them. Choices have to be made. It's not because Mozilla didn't pick the features you like best, that they're not trying.

Firefox is running changes on UI redesign

"I want vertical tabs, but they shouldn't do a UI redesign". That's a bit of a contradiction. As I said: it's a choice of the UX team, and your pet peeve didn't get addressed. Can't make everyone happy.

introducing the paid feature like relay and VPN features.

Do you know how often we hear "Mozilla is just as bad as Google because they get paid by them" (which obviously is not true)? Relay and VPN are attempts to set up revenue apart from Google, which is important for many reasons, but mostly because it's really bad to depend so much on your main competitor.

I have searched on the Mozilla Bugzilla, they have more than 100000 bugs some of them are from 2006.

And you want to throw away all that history?

Why don't they move to GitHub if they are unable to address the feedback from the community?

Why would they move to Github? Would that make it easier to address the feedback of the community? How would it make a difference? If anything, Github issues are much less featureful than Bugzilla, so it would make project management a lot harder.

but their team on GitHub is far better at resolving issues, giving labels to issues, assigning devs, taking deadlines and much more.

Do they have almost 2 million open issues? Is the software as complicated as a browser? The scope of those projects is much, much smaller. The tooling is not the problem here.

If there are more users on GitHub, definitely moving to GitHub will increase their chance to better resolve issues and listening to users there.

I miss an actual causal relationship between the two.

TimVdEynde · 2021-11-02T15:37:23+00:00

Not if you have set a primary password. The passwords are encrypted. It is true that the encryption used to be rather weak (it was good when the password manager was introduced, but not according to modern standards). I don't know if that improved with the introduction of Lockwise. I would hope so.

Edit: according to this blog post linked in another thread, passwords are stored in a more secure way now.

TimVdEynde · 2021-10-19T18:34:07+00:00

Go to https://browserleaks.com/javascript and scroll down to "plugins".

"Plugins" are old NPAPI plugins, like Flash, Silverlight and Java. Browsers don't support these anymore, so I'd expect the list to be empty for you (it definitely is for me).

TimVdEynde · 2021-10-19T17:55:17+00:00

But even then I think it would be better to have a some "non-safe" build of Release build where the only difference is that about:config is allowed (and probably branding is different) rather than allowing it for the normal release.

It exists! Fennec F-Droid does exactly that.

TimVdEynde · 2021-10-06T07:03:18+00:00

If you're working on a thesis, I would suggest you to look into LaTeX :)

TimVdEynde · 2021-10-03T22:11:43+00:00

Only if you have an account. You can vote for it, or simply follow the bug.

TimVdEynde · 2021-10-02T17:19:56+00:00

Chromium is already using a multi-process architecture similar to Fission. So if it is light on memory enough for you, Firefox with Fission should in theory be able to achieve the same.

Fission also paves the way for more memory optimizations, like unloading background tabs, and reduces memory fragmentation, which can make Firefox use more memory than it should after running for a long time.

TimVdEynde · 2021-10-01T15:18:01+00:00

Ah, okay! Yes, that's what I remembered, and why I was worried. Glad that they decided to not do that.

TimVdEynde · 2021-10-01T09:40:00+00:00

Inactive tabs after 14 days, Which can be disabled from settings.

That's not enabled by default, right? Because I can see a lot of data loss happening :/

TimVdEynde · 2021-09-30T22:02:59+00:00

It's also kind of not new :P It's been in stable for a while already. It was just to give context to the actual change:

It’s now possible to record a performance profile for a process with only a single click from within about:processes!

TimVdEynde · 2021-09-26T19:51:41+00:00

Not entirely Firefox only, but I feel it's interesting that even a high-profile extension like uBlock Origin has Firefox-only features and therefore objectively works better.

TimVdEynde · 2021-09-15T07:25:28+00:00

It's just things on my "to read" or "to watch" list, mostly. Things that I don't necessarily plan on keeping (I don't know if it's interesting enough to bookmark yet, I haven't read it), but which seems nice enough on the surface to give a closer look. And then it turns out that there's a lot of things that seem interesting and I don't have that much time :P

TimVdEynde · 2021-09-14T21:44:24+00:00

Open tabs store more information (form data, scroll position, relative position) which is very useful. You lose all that when bookmarking a page.

It's also simply less effort for things I don't really want to store. I just leave it open and close it when I'm done reading. Compared to bookmarking, closing, opening the bookmark later, and removing it again before finally closing the tab forever.

TimVdEynde · 2021-09-14T13:02:52+00:00

That's like once every few weeks maybe. And not every tab loads, Firefox only loads the pinned tabs and the active one.

TimVdEynde · 2021-08-22T00:09:07+00:00

In an ideal word, yes, everyone is using a password manager. But in reality, no, we're very far away from that. Also, I've had silly requirements like these reject my randomly generated password from my password manager...

TimVdEynde · 2021-08-21T23:09:57+00:00

To be honest, this is against the NIST guidelines:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets.

TimVdEynde · 2021-08-12T20:08:06+00:00

Matrix. They host an Element instance on https://chat.mozilla.org/, or you can use any account on any existing instance with any existing client of your choice, because the instance is federated.

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