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honestly its been years now that FF is one of - if not the - browser which uses the least amount of RAM.

Its also one of the most energy efficient on most platforms.. (edge is more efficient on Windows, though it does not take into account that the engine is always running even if another browser is in use)



I can second the energy efficient thing, at least in Linux.

I've been tracking lots of programs with powertop, including many browsers, in the quest of an efficient desktop and Firefox is pretty good.

I also appreciate its great plugins. With vimperator I can configure Firefox using a dotfile, and setup lots of neat things like:

1. A ssh proxy mode that also routes DNS queries

set! network.proxy.socks=localhost

set! network.proxy.socks_port=8888

set! network.proxy.socks_remote_dns=true

command -nargs=1 proxy set! network.proxy.type=<args>

2. Site-specific Google searches, with autocomplete for the site URL

command -nargs=+ -complete=url site open google site:<args>

map s :site<space>

All this is really neat functionality, and very simple to achieve. I am waiting for good per-tab sandboxing, but in the meanwhile I have aliased firefox to /usr/bin/firejail so the whole application is sandboxed.

Apologies for the offtopic, but it's really exciting how a program that seemed to have lost development momentum is becoming really great again. Quite close to being the emacs of browsers if you ask me, with so many features and scriptability. Paradoxically you can get best access to these features with a plugin that tries to emulate vi, but you get the idea!


On the other hand, all the inner refactorings happening to Firefox may threaten the addon ecosystem by constraining them Chrome-like. There's no telling if there'll be a vimperator for firefox 50, 55, 60. The way vi emulator addons work for Chrome, it might be a potential travesty.


Could you please give a little more info about ssh through vimperator? Can it do local port forwarding?

I couldn't find much doing a google search for "vimperator ssh".


It can do anything Firefox can, it's just a shortcut using Javascript, nothing Vimperator-specific.




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