[HN Gopher] Firefox Release Includes Total Cookie Protection and...
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Firefox Release Includes Total Cookie Protection and Multiple
Picture-in-Picture
Author : stunt
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-02-24 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| ducktective wrote:
| Good to see that in last few releases, no needless UI changes
| were introduced (which were causing dramas in the past).
| ronjouch wrote:
| Brace yourself: major UI revamp coming around Firefox 89,
| https://google.com/search?q=firefox%20proton
| ngngngng wrote:
| > The new Proton interface is much easier on the eye the
| original interface.
|
| It looks almost exactly the same to me, just a couple things
| shuffled around.
|
| Anyway, I think it's perfect exactly how it is.
| agilob wrote:
| oh no, the megabar is still there
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Firefox+Proton
| Grakel wrote:
| RIP CTRL-SHIFT-B
| SilasX wrote:
| We just had a big thread about Total Cookie Protection:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26237404
| noizejoy wrote:
| Unfortunately the top of that thread is now pretty much about
| another project/topic
| pentagrama wrote:
| I find useful the Picture-in-Picture feature when was introduced,
| but find it really annoying that the icon has to be visible on
| every video (on mouse hover), and I disable it.
|
| Hope they introduce an option to show a PiP icon on the address
| bar when a video is on the tab, which is less intrusive, like the
| Reader View icon/feature.
| download13 wrote:
| Multiple PiP is a great idea
| mxxx wrote:
| PiP is one of those things that never seemed particularly
| useful to me until I started using it, and now it's one of my
| favourite features
| agumonkey wrote:
| For some odd reason I don't get the PiP icon on the firefox
| demo video. It works well on different youtube videos though :)
| arprocter wrote:
| By default the button only shows on videos over 45 secs long
|
| You can change the default in about:config
| media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.min-
| video-secs
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| Is there a possibility sites just begin blocking Firefox?
|
| It's only ~8% of the desktop market share and ~4% across all
| devices. It doesn't seem inconceivable sites just give up
| supporting it if they're not getting the ad revenue.
| stunt wrote:
| 8% is a lot! and Firefox isn't alone, Safari is also on the
| same path.
| elktea wrote:
| technically impossible, firefox would be forced to pretend to
| be another browser.
| nathancahill wrote:
| What, you mean like this? (from Chrome)
|
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36
| (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36
| slimsag wrote:
| With fingerprinting it's not impossible. Quoting a recent
| Webkit thread[1] in which Google blocked all sign in from
| non-Safari WebKit browsers:
|
| > But if Google does this properly and uses more
| sophisticated browser fingerprinting techniques, Epiphany is
| done for. This could be an existential threat for non-Safari
| WebKit browsers. Nobody is going to be interested in using a
| browser that doesn't support Google websites. Google's
| expressly-stated goal is to block embedded browser frameworks
| and non-supported browsers from signing into Google accounts.
| The blog post says: "This block affects CEF-based apps and
| other non-supported browsers." It says: "We do not allow
| sign-in from browsers based on frameworks like CEF or
| Embedded Internet Explorer."
|
| [1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
| dev/2020-November/...
| corobo wrote:
| And ads in the address bar search results.
|
| https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433
|
| E: saved you a click on my own link. In about:config you can
| disable this crap by setting the following to false
|
| browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored
|
| browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites
| agilob wrote:
| I can't reproduce that. How do I reproduce that?
| corobo wrote:
| Apparently it's an A/B test thing. I was a lucky winner. All
| I did was update (Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS)
|
| To confirm I disabled all plugins immediately to ensure it
| was bog standard Firefox (which is why I was so irritated at
| the time, proper threw off my day).
|
| Bonus it had the Amazon tracking code "admpdesktopuk-21",
| which if you do a search reveals a bunch of plugins that went
| rogue.
|
| E: apologies I can't track down the source where I saw it was
| an ab test
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I am seeing it in my Windows firefox install.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I like to support Mozilla and I know they need funds... But
| don't mess with my interface. This is a bad bad move.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| I make monthly donations to Mozilla to support their cause. I
| will stop my donations and migrate to a different browser if
| they continue down this path.
| [deleted]
| stunt wrote:
| You can disable it. It isn't actually ads, it's sponsored
| link and the sponsor isn't tracking you (at least not until
| you click..)
|
| browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored
|
| browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites
| ngokevin wrote:
| I don't think donations go towards browser development. Goes
| more towards general Internet advocacy, social justice
| campaigns, and salaries of employees of the Foundation who
| don't work on Firefox.
| gcthomas wrote:
| We get the browser for free and these are just ads, not
| trackers - they are not stealing our data like Chrome, FB,
| and the rest.
|
| I have nothing against straight ads.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I agree. But I use those links for quick links to site I
| visit a lot. THis gets in my way
| kbenson wrote:
| Unfortunately, "ads" has become a synonym for many people
| to tracking and privacy and invasive elements, when like
| most things it encompasses a whole spectrum from minimal
| and informative (the name of the restaurant on the outside
| of the building)to manipulative and annoying. People
| feelings about one particularly negative segment of a
| spectrum often overflow into other examples and taint their
| feeling. It's just how people are.
|
| I also have nothing against straight ads. Who knows how
| Mozilla will implement this though, and whether it will be
| more annoying than useful. I have some suspicions, but I'll
| reserve judgement until I've experienced them, since I
| sometimes have a hard time predicting correctly (as I
| suspect many people do) because the topic is somewhat
| emotionally charged.
| [deleted]
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Cool, but when will they release a feature that makes it so I can
| run a Zoom call without turning my MBP into a toaster hot enough
| to melt diamonds?
| rnestler wrote:
| Zoom is a different software, so I don't really see a
| connection to Firefox. Am I missing something?
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Zoom calls in Firefox -- a lot of people don't download the
| software but just run it in browser.
| avolcano wrote:
| The technical details of Total Cookie Protection are going to be
| of interest to any web dev: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Pri...
|
| It's not enabled by default (it's part of Strict privacy
| controls), but I think the heuristics it's using might be copied
| by other browser or extensions implementing similar features. I
| don't love the amount of "heuristics-based" features being added
| to browsers, since they're not always easy to discover as a
| developer, but it's certainly better than a whitelist/blacklist
| system like Google"s used for certain features. The console.log
| entries that article mentions should help a bit with debugging as
| well.
| msk20 wrote:
| Is there any privacy benifit to use containers now with the new
| isolations built into firefox? I'm using cookie autodelete +
| Containers, So now its either isolate and keep them or Isolate
| and delete them. I quite like this.
| stunt wrote:
| Containers aren't going to give you additional protection
| against third-party cookies with this feature. But, you still
| have other useful benefits like having different sessions open
| on the same websites using containers, or just grouping
| websites by forcing them into specific containers
| (Work/Personal/Random etc..).
| aimor wrote:
| Why can't I use picture-in-picture on that video? Is it just me?
|
| Well, I can access PiP through the right-click menu if I right-
| click twice to bypass the YouTube menu. But the floating PiP icon
| doesn't want to appear.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Cool. But I alreasy had everything I wanted in Firefox, but one
| thing. Can I please have a non-buggy backdrop-filter: blur
| enabled and working by default in my Fitefox?
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| I believe that property is still in the draft phase. I'm sure
| they'll implement it properly soon.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Please don't derail threads like this. Your comment is so
| generic that it could be posted to any of a hundred different
| posts completely unchanged, which means it has nothing to do
| with the post at all. Write a blog post about it and post
| _that_ to HN if you want your feature request to receive
| attention.
| difosfor wrote:
| I guess multi PiP makes sense. But I'd really like to be able to
| show any element in PiP, not just videos
| cassepipe wrote:
| I was wondering : What is the purpose of picture in picture? I
| don't have any use case for it and was curious about who does.
| kbenson wrote:
| I haven't used it much, but it does allow you to not have to
| pull a tab out for youtube or the like if you want to watch
| something on the side while doing something else, and it does
| it with zero extra interface, which is nice (it's always
| annoying when I want to resize a video in the window to take
| almost all the window size and there's useless padding I can't
| easily bypass).
| cardamomo wrote:
| I've used it when I am multitasking (watching something fun
| while "working") or while taking notes on the video.
| gcthomas wrote:
| I use it to make it easy to pass the video only to OBS Studio -
| the video shows up as a separate window.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| I use PiP in Safari, and I find it useful for watching a video
| in a small window in the corner of my screen without having to
| keep the page the video was on (YouTube, etc.) open. That way,
| I can watch the video while reading other tabs, or working in
| other windows.
|
| It's nice because PiP (at least Safari's/macOS' implementation)
| keeps the video above all other windows, and it even carries
| over into other Spaces.
|
| In short: multitasking.
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(page generated 2021-02-24 23:00 UTC)