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Firefox's New Multi-Line Console Editor is Awesome

YuanHao Chiang on March 10, 2020

Firefox may no longer be the go-to browser for most developers. However, those of us who were present in the First Browser War in the 90's remembe...
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rhymes profile image
rhymes

The new console is nice indeed!

My favorite features I use everyday are:

  • containers
  • send tab to device
  • enhanced tracking protection

Also love the new picture in picture capabilities.

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yuanhao profile image
YuanHao Chiang • Edited

Containers are amazing and overall FF is doing a great job with its privacy settings. It really helps that it's not tied to any of the giants of advertising 🥳

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

It really helps that it's not tied to any of the giants of advertising 🥳

Kinda 👀

In 2013 most of Mozilla revenue came from the search advertising deal they did with Google (and other partners). Basically they had to put Google as a default search engine in exchange for money: computerworld.com/article/2850881/... - same in 2016.

According to the latest available report, from 2018, they still have a sizable portion of their revenue coming from those deals:

Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.)

By looking at the audited financial statement [pdf] you will notice that out of 450 millions in revenue, 429 of those come from those deals (look at "royalties"), so roughly 95%. Don't know how much of that is strictly from Google but I bet it is the majority.

So yeah, Mozilla kinda depends on giants of advertising to survive.

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yuanhao profile image
YuanHao Chiang

Yes, fully aware of that, but at least they are not one owned by the other one. If in ten years DuckDuckGo is the most used and profitable search engine (hey, one can dream!), I'm sure it will be easier for Mozilla to set it as its default engine as compared to Chrome.

You bring good points and in the end, money is pretty much the ultimate deal breaker.

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Mike Lockhart

I use Firefox exclusively, not only because Mozilla needs our support, and we need another browser than all the v8-based ones, but because Firefox doesn't do silly things like hide the URI method in the location bar, or eat up all my computer's memory. It's developer tools have always made more sense and been more helpful to me than Chrome's as well.
Mozilla's innovations (WASM, Rust, AV1, privacy protections, multi-account containers, MDN...) benefit the whole Internet. We should keep Firefox in mind for all of our web developments, especially as developers.

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Jan von der Assen

Definitely the Shape Path Editor
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/T...

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YuanHao Chiang

Nice, didn't know about it, going to try it right now :)

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Victor Neves

What do you mean by multi-line editor? What it does that you couldn't do it before? Ifcan add new lines pressing shit+enter. Besides that you have the Scratchpad

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YuanHao Chiang

This editor will let you keep your snippet, whereas on Chrome after any expression (say, defining a function), the code will disappear.

I find it more pleasing to be able to see multiple expressions instead of just the last one and needing to use the up arrow to browse through them, but only when editing big chunks of code. For the usual, the console is just fine :)

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Robert

Chrome has this since longer time

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Roberto Pasini

Unlike Chrome, Firefox is open-source.

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黎紫珊

Snippets in Chrome can debugger, but firefox can't.