#firefox based

[stormywormy]

firefox save me

#firefox #foss #firefox based #based #based firefox #yeah

[observethewalrus]

PLEASE DO NOT GIFT ME BADGES

Tumblr is getting rid of avatars and no longer showing where a reblog comes from in post headers to “afford more room for badges.”

I always felt kinda bad when I was gifted badges and then didn’t use them, cuz people spent actual money on them. So I’m asking, please do not gift me badges, or any other tumblr merch for that matter.

I threw them a bone last year and paid for the ad-free because the ads and blazed softcore porn on the app were infuriating, but I’m canceling it. They’re not getting anything from me anymore. I’ll have to switch back to using the Firefox mobile browser. Hopefully the new dash un-fuckers that are going around will work on mobile.

#for the record ‘running an experiment’ now means ‘this is how it’s going to be regardless of feedback’ #someone posted screenshots of responses from two different staff members #that were exact copies of each other #they were in response to separate feedback messages sent almost a month apart #one about the dash layout and one about the avatars #they’re lucky cuz staff never even graced me with a response to the long thought out civil message I’d sent them #maybe I was too civil #this is all the more reason for me to get rid of my iphone too #apparently apple makes it impossible for Firefox to run extensions on mobile browser #so idk if I can fix my dash #and if/when this update hits the app too AMD I cancel ad free it’ll be completely unusable #@staff #are you in so much debt that you’re intentionally trying to blow up the site? is that what’s going on? #because you know we’re a petty spiteful user base and won’t give you a dime if this goes on #so what’s the plan here? #tumblr update #dashboard update #badges

[melyzard]

Time for a new edition of my ongoing vendetta against Google fuckery!

Hey friends, did you know that Google is now using Google docs to train it's AI, whether you like it or not? (link goes to: zdnet.com, July 5, 2023). Oh and on Monday, Google updated it's privacy policy to say that it can train it's two AI (Bard and Cloud AI) on any data it scrapes from it's users, period. (link goes to: The Verge, 5 July 2023). Here is Digital Trends also mentioning this new policy change (link goes to: Digital Trends, 5 July 2023). There are a lot more, these are just the most succinct articles that might explain what's happening.

FURTHER REASONS GOOGLE AND GOOGLE CHROME SUCK TODAY:

Stop using Google Analytics, warns Sweden’s privacy watchdog, as it issues over $1M in fines (link goes to: TechCrunch, 3 July 2023) [TLDR: google got caught exporting european users' data to the US to be 'processed' by 'US government surveillance,' which is HELLA ILLEGAL. I'm not going into the Five Eyes, Fourteen Eyes, etc agreements, but you should read up on those to understand why the 'US government surveillance' people might ask Google to do this for countries that are not apart of the various Eyes agreements - and before anyone jumps in with "the US sucks!" YES but they are 100% not the only government buying foreign citizens' data, this is just the one the Swedes caught. Today.]

PwC Australia ties Google to tax leak scandal (link goes to: Reuters, 5 July 2023). [TLDR: a Russian accounting firm slipped Google "confidential information about the start date of a new tax law leaked from Australian government tax briefings." Gosh, why would Google want to spy on governments about tax laws? Can't think of any reason they would want to be able to clean house/change policy/update their user agreement to get around new restrictions before those restrictions or fines hit. Can you?

SO - here is a very detailed list of browsers, updated on 28 June, 2023 on slant.com, that are NOT based on Google Chrome (note: any browser that says 'Chromium-based' is just Google wearing a party mask. It means that Google AND that other party has access to all your data). This is an excellent list that shows pros and cons for each browser, including who the creator is and what kinds of policies they have (for example, one con for Pale Moon is that the creator doesn't like and thinks all websites should be hostile to Tor).

#you need to protect yourself #anti google #anti chrome #anti chromium #chromium based browsers #internet security #current events #i recommend firefox #but if you have beef with it #here are alternatives! #so called ai #anti artificial intelligence #anti chatgpt #anti bard #anti cloud ai #data scraping

[moonlit-tulip]

What's your favorite ebook-compatible reading software? Firefox EPUBReader isn't great, but I'm not what, if anything, works better.

Very short answer: for EPUBs, on Windows I use and recommend the Calibre reader, and on iOS I use Marvin but it's dying and no longer downloadable so my fallback recommendation is the native Apple Books app; for PDFs, on Windows I use Sumatra, and on iOS I use GoodReader; for CBZs, I use CDisplayEx on Windows and YACReader on iOS; and I don't use other platforms very often, so I can't speak as authoritatively about those, although Calibre's reader is cross-platform for Windows/Mac/Linux, and YACReader for Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android, so they can serve as at least a minimum baseline of quality against which alternatives can be compared for those platforms.

Longer answer:

First off, I will say: yeah, Firefox EPUBReader isn't great. Neither, really, are most ebook readers. I have yet to find a single one that I'm fully satisfied with. I have an in-progress project to make one that I'm fully satisfied with, but it's been slow, probably isn't going to hit 1.0.0 release before next year at current rates, and isn't going to be actually definitively the best reader on the market for probably months or years post-release even assuming I succeed in my plans to keep up its development. So, for now, selection-of-ebook-readers tends to be very much a matter of choosing the best among a variety of imperfect options.

Formats-wise, there are a lot of ebook formats, but I'm going to collapse my answers down to focusing on just three, for simplicity. Namely: EPUB, PDF, and CBZ.

EPUB is the best representative of the general "reflowable-text ebook designed to display well on a wide variety of screens" genre. Other formats of similar nature exist—Kindle's MOBI and AZW3 formats, for instance (the latter of which is, in essence, just an EPUB in a proprietary Amazon wrapper)—but conversion between formats-in-this-broad-genre is generally pretty easy and not excessively lossy, so you're generally safe to convert to EPUB as needed if you've got different formats-in-this-genre and a reader that doesn't support those formats directly. (And it's rare for a program made by anyone other than Amazon to work for non-EPUB formats-in-this-genre and not for EPUBs.)

PDF is a pretty unique / distinctive format without any widely-used alternatives I'm aware of, unless you count AZW4 (which is a PDF in a proprietary Amazon wrapper). It's the best format I'm aware of for representations of books with rigid non-reflowable text-formatting, as with e.g. TTRPG rulebooks which do complicated things with their art-inserts and sidebars.

And CBZ serves here as a stand-in for the general category of "bunch of images in an archive file of some sort, ordered by filename", which is a common format for comics. CBZ is zip-based, CBR is RAR-based, CB7 is 7-zip-based, et cetera; but they're easy to convert between one another just by extracting one and then re-archiving it in one's preferred format, and CBZ is the most commonly distributed and the most commonly supported by readers, so it's the one I'm going to focus on.

With those prefaces out of the way, here are my comprehensive answers by (platform, format) pair:

Browser, EPUB

I'm unaware of any good currently-available browser-based readers for any of the big ebook formats. I've tried out EPUBReader for Firefox, as well as some other smaller Firefox-based reader extensions, and none of them have impressed me. I haven't tested any Chrome-based readers particularly extensively, but based on some superficial testing I don't have the sense that options are particularly great there either.

This state of affairs feels intuitively wrong to me. The browser is, in a significant sense, the natural home for EPUB-like reflowable-text ebooks, to a greater degree than it's the natural home for a great many of the other things people manage to warp it into being used for; after all, EPUBs are underlyingly made of HTML-file-trees. My own reader-in-progress will be browser-based. But nonetheless, for now, my advice for browser-based readers boils down to "don't use them unless you really need to".

If you do have to use one, EPUBReader is the best extension-based one I've encountered. I have yet to find a good non-extension-based website-based one, but am currently actively in the market for such a thing for slightly-high-context reasons I'll put in the tags.

Browser, PDF

Firefox and Chrome both have built-in PDF readers which are, like, basically functional and fine, even if not actively notably-good. I'm unaware of any browser-based PDF-reading options better than those two.

Browser, CBZ

If there exist any good options here, I'm not aware of them.

Windows, EPUB

Calibre's reader is, unfortunately, the best on the market right now. It doesn't have a very good scrolled display mode, which is a mark against it by my standards, and it's a bit slow to open books and has a general sense of background-clunkiness to its UI, but in terms of the quality with which it displays its content in paginated mode—including relatively-uncommon sorts of content that most readers get wrong, like vertical text—it's pretty unparalleled, and moreover it's got a generally wider range of features and UI-customization options than most readers offer. So overall it's my top recommendation on most axes, despite my issues with it.

There's also Sigil. I very emphatically don't actually recommend Sigil as a reader for most purposes—it's marketed as an EPUB editor, lacks various features one would want in a reader, and has a much higher-clutter UI than one would generally want in a reader—but its preview pane's display engine is even more powerful than Calibre's for certain purposes—it can successfully handle EPUBs which contain video content, for instance, which Calibre falls down on—so it can be a useful backup to have on hand for cases where Calibre's display-capabilities break down.

Windows, PDF

I use SumatraPDF and think it's pretty good. It's very much built for reading, rather than editing / formfilling / etc.; it's fast-to-launch, fast-to-load-pages, not too hard to configure to look nice on most PDFs, and generally lightweight in its UI.

When I need to do fancier things, I fall back on Adobe Reader, which is much more clunky on pretty much every axis for purposes of reading but which supports form-filling and suchlike pretty comprehensively.

(But I haven't explored this field in huge amounts of depth; plausibly there exist better options that I'm unaware of, particularly on the Adobe-reader-ish side of things. (I'd be a bit more surprised if there were something better than SumatraPDF within its niche, for Windows, and very interested in hearing about any such thing if it does exist.))

Windows, CBZ

My usual CBZ-reader for day-to-day use—which I also use for PDF-based comics, since it has various features which are better than SumatraPDF for the comic-reading use case in particular—is an ancient one called CDisplayEx which, despite its age, still manages to be a solid contender for best in its field; it's reasonably performant, it has most of the features I need (good handling of spreads, a toggle for left-to-right versus right-to-left reading, a good set of options for setting how the pages are fit into the monitor, the ability to force it forward by just one page when it's otherwise in two-page mode, et cetera), and in general it's a solid functional bit of software, at least by the standards of its field.

The reason I describe CDisplayEx as only "a solid contender for" best in its field, though, is: recently I had cause to try out YACReader, a reader I tried years ago on Windows and dismissed at the time, on Linux; and it was actually really good, like basically as good as CDisplayEx is on Windows. I haven't tried the more recent versions of YACReader on Windows directly, yet; but it seems pretty plausible that my issues with the older version are now resolved, that the modern Windows version is comparable to the Linux version, and therefore that it's on basically the same level as CDisplayEx quality-wise.

Mac, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

I don't use Mac often enough to have opinions here beyond "start with whatever cross-platform thing is good elsewhere, as a baseline, and go on from there". Don't settle for any EPUB reader on Mac worse than the Calibre one, since Calibre works on Mac. (I've heard vague good things about Apple's native one; maybe it's actually a viable option?) Don't settle for any CBZ reader on Mac worse than YACReader, since YACReader works on Mac. Et cetera. (For PDFs I don't have any advice on what to use even as baseline, unfortunately; for whatever reason, PDF readers, or at least the better ones, seem to tend not to be natively cross-platform.)

Linux, EPUB

For the most part, my advice is the same as Windows: just go with the Calibre reader (and maybe use Sigil as a backup for edge cases). However, if you, like me, prefer scrolled EPUB-reading over paginated EPUB-reading, I'd also suggest checking out Foliate; while it's less powerful than the Calibre reader overall, with fewer features and more propensity towards breaking in edge cases, it's basically functional for normal books lacking unusual/tricky formatting, and, unlike Calibre, it has an actually-good scrolled display mode.

Linux, PDF

I have yet to find any options I'm fully satisfied with here, for the "fast launch and fast rendering and functional lightweight UI" niche that I use SumatraPDF for on Windows. Among the less-good-but-still-functional options I've tried out: SumatraPDF launched via Wine takes a while to start up, but once launched it has the usual nice SumatraPDF featureset. Zathura with the MuPDF backend is very pleasantly-fast, but has a somewhat-unintuitive keyboard-centric control scheme and is hard to configure. And qpdfview offers a nice general-purpose PDF-reading UI, including being quick to launch, but its rendering backend is slower than either Sumatra's or Zathura's so it's less good for paging quickly through large/heavy PDFs.

Linux, CBZ

YACReader, as mentioned previously in the Windows section, is pretty definitively the best option I've found here, and its Linux version is a solid ~equal to CDisplayEx's Windows version. Like CDisplayEx, it's also better than more traditional PDF readers for reading PDF-based comics.

iOS/iPadOS, EPUB

My current main reading app is Marvin. However, it hasn't been updated in years, and is no longer available on the app store, so I'm currently in the process of getting ready to migrate elsewhere in anticipation of Marvin's likely permanent breakage some time in the next few years. Thus I will omit detailed discussion of Marvin and instead discuss the various other at-least-vaguely-comparably-good options on the market.

For general-purpose reading, including scrolled reading if that's your thing, Apple's first-party Books app turns out to be surprisingly good. It's not the best in terms of customization of display-style, but it's basically solidly functional, moreso than the vast majority of the apps on the market.

For reading of books with vertical text in particular, meanwhile, I use Yomu, which is literally the only reader I've encountered to date on any platform which has what I'd consider to be a sensible and high-quality way of handling scrolled reading of vertical-text-containing books. While I don't recommend it for more general purposes, due to awkward handling of EPUBs' tables of contents (namely, kind of ignoring them and doing its own alternate table-of-contents thing it thinks is better), it is extremely good for that particular niche, as well as being more generally solid-aside-from-the-TOC-thing.

iOS/iPadOS, PDF

I use GoodReader. I don't know if it's the best in the market, but it's very solidly good enough for everything I've tried to do with it thus far. It's fast; its UI is good at getting out of my way, while still packing in all the features I want as options when I go looking for them (most frequently switching between two-page-with-front-cover and two-page-without-front-cover display for a given book); also in theory it has a bunch of fancy PDF-editing features for good measure, although in practice I never use those and can't comment on their quality. But, as a reader, it's very solidly good enough for me, and I wish I could get a reader like it for desktop.

iOS/iPadOS, CBZ

YACReader has an iOS version; following the death of my former favorite comic reader for iOS (ComicRack), it's very solidly the best option I'm aware of on the market. (And honestly would be pretty competitive even if ComicRack were still around.) I recommend it here as I do on Linux.

Android, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

It's been years since I've had an Android device, and accordingly have very little substantial advice here. (I'm expecting to move back to Android for my next phone-and-maybe-also-tablet, out of general preferring-open-hardware-and-software-when-practical feelings, but it'll plausibly be a while, because Apple is much better at long-lasting hardware and software than any Android manufacturers I'm aware of.) For EPUB, I recall Moon+ reader was the best option I could find back circa 2015ish, but that's long enough ago that plausibly things have changed substantially at this point. For CBZ, both YACReader and CDisplayEx have Android versions, although I haven't tried either and so can't comment on their quality. For PDF, you're on your own; I have no memories or insights there.

Conclusion

...and that's it. If there are other major platforms on which ebook-reader software can be chosen, I'm failing to think of them currently, and this is what I've got for all platforms I have managed to think of.

In the future... well, I hope my own reader-in-development (slated for 1.0.0 release as a Firefox extension with only EPUB support, with ambitions of eventually expanding to cover other platforms and other formats) will one day join this recommendation-pile, but it's currently not yet in anything resembling a recommendable form. And I hope that there are lots of good reader-development projects in progress that I currently don't know about; but, if there are, I currently don't know about them.

So, overall, this is all I've got! I hope it's helpful.

#Archive #Social #Ask #Ebooks #Infodump #the short summary of why i want to find a web-based epub reader is: #currently i'm learning to read japanese. #one of the natural next steps for me to take in the japanese-learning process is to start reading actual books. #i have some very useful browser extensions—yomichan and jpdbreader—which make reading japanese in-browser more convenient than elsewhere. #(jpdbreader in particular is probably the best training-wheels-ish japanese-reading tool i've found to date.) #however i can't use firefox extensions in non-firefox reader apps such as calibre #and browser security limits are such that i can't use them on other extensions' associated webpages either #thus i need to find a non-extension-based website i can get to display my japanese books so i can then read them with those extensions.

[sleep-nurse]

Rate my setup

I FUCKING LOVE MARETU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!/10

#asks #YOU HAVE SUCH BASED TASTE HOLY SHIT #also it looks really cool like It's So Clean #EATS IT #based firefox user btw

[adobodemon]

Poll inspired by my coworkers…

Bonus question: what browser are you using?

#anthy @ the polls #polls #i am in the 6-9 crowd #nothing too crazy #i also use tab groups when shit gets too crazy #my browser of choice for work is firefox but personally i use vivaldi #it’s a really cool chromium based browser (chromium is the good version of chrome dw) and it has a lot of cool bells n whistles #plus I can give it a Windows XP theme :D

[prototypelq]

FIREFOX GANG

Don't want to rain on your parade, but while looking through different browser privacy reviews, I was disappointed to learn that default Firefox is not privacy-secure browser either. By default, Firefox uses google's analytic features, plus the Mozilla company is partially owned by google, so they aren't really independent either.

This issue can be mitigated by switching to a more tight-code Firefox-based browser, I heard Waterfox mentioned a number of times, or using extensions + manually digging into Firefox settings to turn it off.

I'm not about to turn anyone away from using Firefox, just wanted to raise some notice about this issue.

#(opera gx user be telling you of firefox privacy concerns lol) #sigh maybe someday ill switch from gx but as of right now i love it too much and will just hope my extensions handle the privacy concerns #of using a chromium-based browser and opera at that #firefox #google #internet privacy #reblog to save a life

[infinitystation]

most annoying people on the internet right now are the people going onto the youtube adblock posts like "HAH! you idiot! you CLEARLY arent using firefox and ublock origin! i know everything you are doing based solely on this single post you made!" all said to a guy who is using ublock and firefox

#the feature is rolling out. it is USER based. your account just hasnt been hit with it yet #it will happen to you too eventually. some ppl have been dealing with it already #source: i am using firefox and ublock origin and i am getting adblock messages #source: ALL OF US ARE USING FIREFOX AND UBLOCK- #im blocking everyone over this hostile overconfidence annoys me so much 😭 #chat

[djsangos]

a while back i kept getting ads about designer eyepatches over and over again to the point i complained at eight about it who apparently then told marina because the next time she came over took my phone and laptop worked some hacker magic then gave them back saying "you shouldnt be getting those ads anymore"

and i havent i havent gotten any ads anymore at all actually

but i still wonder how and why the advertisers decided the thing they should put in my face over and over again is eyepatches and not something id actually want

like more goldfish

but anyway are ads on tideblr really that fucking wild

#ic text #dashwatching #//inspired by the time i kept getting targeted ads for glasses over and over again #//i'm GUESSING google must've sold the info that i wear glasses based on the emails i used to get from my optometrist back when i had one #//...i really need to switch email providers it's just i've ahd gmail for a decade all my shit is connected to it #//but anyway i now have ubo on firefox i've been meaning to install an adblocker on my phone but it requires rooting and i haven't done tha #//in SO long i forgot hwo so fjdafjka

[pretty-little-martyr]

not that anybody but me uses this godforsaken browser, but the 5 second freeze youtube has implemented also effects Edge users

#its not just firefox its anything that isnt chrome. #edge sucks also. its chromium based #i only use it here on my working-on-stuff laptop cause i dont have to Internet much on it

[20cm]

new carrd :3 dont look at it on safari 🫶

#😭 i cant get thee. styling to work on firefox AND safari + also my phone browser and uhm......... i figure most people are like. #on firefox or chrome <3 pretty sure it looks ok in chromium based browsers ! bc my phones browser is vivaldi. so. #will tweak it more eventually i think #took me legitimately 5 hours. so. gonna go sleep 🫡

[the-nightmare-theater]

making that neocities page and losing by mind because things keep showing up wildly differently on different browsers

like. please the text is perfectly fine on firefox why is it doing that on chromium stop please

#nightmare ramble #yes i dled ungoogled chromium purely to test how it looks on browsers besides firefox #im gonna fucking lose my mind this shit was looking perfect on firefox but nooo it has to be all fucked up looking on chrome based shit #fuck chrome istg #edit: the site thats on there currently is a place holder im working on the site locally

[mctreeleth]

I just discovered that windows no longer asks you to input a user name for yourself - it instead uses the first 5 characters of your account, which is a big problem if your name is Sara and your surname starts with an H and and you don’t want your user account to be fucking sarah.

#it does not warn you that this is the case at any part of the process of setting up a new computer #I just noticed that my user folder was named sarah and I was like '''the fuck it is'' #and so far all I have done is install firefox and put on a nice desktop background and download all my old laptop's files from backblaze #so not is the time to work out how to fix it before I might catastrophically fuck up everything #but I am sure there are some people out there for whom this is very very bad #I thought that we has learned in this the year of our lord 2023 #to not have computers autofill very important core identity markers based on abbreviations from other user data

[illuminatedmoth]

writing a blog post abt tumblr's monetization attempts and so i took a look at the tumblrmart and theres so much shit in there id never heard of them making merch of

#i follow the right kind of people that i never had to be subjected to it ig #its stuff thats way more savvy to tumblr memes that were happening around when they were made i assume #compared to the alien and pizza stuff from before #i also live in pleasant little bubble of no advertisements #which fun fact adblocker also stopped me from seeing blazed posts #i would still get them in the app but never on desktop where the adblocker lives #then i switched to using tumblr on mobile via firefox and not the app #but the bridge between user base and staff was ash by the time they started making merch people would want #major fumble btw since the user base was warming up to staff post acquisition #personal.txt

[cryptids]

Just a reminder to my beloved followers to delete and replace adblock plus with ublock origin (adblock used to be the best but its fucked now and ublock origin is better) and replace μtorrent with qbittorrent for the same reason

#i was gonna add to avoid chrome/chromium based browers and download firefox instead too but theres already enough posts about that on here #i also recommend the privacy badger extension #🐊

[gideonisms]

unrelated but there was a post going around a while ago about a site or program or extension that removes visual clutter from a site when you're trying to use it. Anyone on here remember if that was a real thing? or what it was called?

#or any firefox extension suggestions that simplify the like. text bubble here text bubble over there menu in 5 places etc #this problem is so difficult to describe #i've recently realized part of the reason i struggle so much to achieve goals that involve filling out things on sites is that #the sites themselves are like sandpaper on my brain #why are there that many buttons in that many different places why can't it be top to bottom or all on the left or like. #can we just have fewer distracting colors #idk #like when i'm filling out applications for anything or researching what to research to get the result i want. the sites are awful #i so strongly prefer everything to be text based #have some pity on me the constant pictures are distracting #i say as i'm on tumblr 15 hours a day. but at least on tumblr you can just follow text heavy blogs. and you scroll one way #on tumblr mobile the pictures take up the whole screen there isn't stuff on the edges #does any of that make sense. #i was raised without much internet so i still long for reference books with a simple layout #like it takes me hours to make myself accomplish tasks if i know i have to wade through sites that are too loud. u know?