[HN Gopher] Firefox 90
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox 90
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 352 points
Date : 2021-07-13 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mozilla.org)
| rsp1984 wrote:
| Last time I used FF on my Macbook (about 2 or 3 years ago) it had
| a big issue with battery drain (IIRC it was because of high GPU
| load even when idle). Did they ever fix that?
| cosmojg wrote:
| Yep, I believe battery usage on MacBooks was massively improved
| in an update a few months ago. Give it a try and report back!
| iaml wrote:
| I use ff dev daily and IMO battery life hit compared to safari
| is still pretty bad.
| jason2323 wrote:
| Still the same. It absolutely heats up my MacBook Pro
| hendry wrote:
| Compared to Chrome, Firefox lacks two features for me
|
| 1. Native Tab search https://youtu.be/HmWqo4X2IB8 2. Ability to
| remember my CC details
|
| The feature that Firefox has that my workflow can't live without
| is simply `Ctrl-Tab` to move quickly between two tabs.
| _Microft wrote:
| What does native tab search do exactly? Does it search the
| content of all tabs or does it allow to jump to a tab by typing
| part of the address or title?
|
| Firefox can do the latter by using the _%_ search shortcut in
| the address bar.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| In Firefox:
|
| 1. Using "% xyz" searches for open tabs matching xyz
|
| 2. Not sure since which version, but CC card details can be
| stored and used with autofill, as are addresses.
| jeff_carr wrote:
| The biggest annoyance is the bookmark toolbar icons not
| transferring or syncing between machines.
|
| I don't care about the theoretical tracking issues of
| favicon.ico. There should be an option to turn on syncing of
| the bookmark icons.
| guerby wrote:
| For tab search in firefox do Ctrl-l (to go to the URL bar) then
| type %xyz will list tabs with xyz in it, select the tab you
| want and done. Eg to list your HN tabs and go quicky to one of
| them:
|
| ctrl-l %new.y (use arrows then enter)
| trog wrote:
| Saw in the patch notes today for Firefox Android that it now
| supports storing CC details. I was a bit surprised to not see
| it mentioned in the desktop version's release notes though.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| It is supported on desktop for North American users since 81.
| starik36 wrote:
| class foo { #privateClassMethod() {}
| #privateClassField; }
|
| Finally.
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
| for more details for anyone else curious
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Is there a plugin that imitates Chrome's tab groups? I tried tree
| style tab but it's not the same.
| fleddr wrote:
| I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's
| limited market share was heavily downvoted.
|
| I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also
| want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers
| whom are trying to make the best of it.
|
| That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There
| is no good in do-good software without reach.
|
| Based on statcounter, Firefox's market share went from a 2009
| peak (32%) to a mere 3.29% as we speak. Just in the last year
| alone, it bleeds market share from 4.25% to 3.29%.
|
| So it keeps bleeding market share, 12 years in a row. The reason
| it's still losing market share likely is due to the mobile market
| still growing in size, whilst Firefox has no presence there:
| 0.48%.
|
| I have access to a handful of web properties, one of which very
| large and global (billions of page views). In our dashboards,
| Firefox does not even exist. It's not in the top 10. Above it are
| Chromium clones most have never heard of.
|
| So to the "ordinary" world, those without a particular stake in
| open source, it's a dead browser. It's even smaller than weird
| regional browsers that most businesses wouldn't explicitly
| support.
|
| (note that "support" is overstated as most web tech works just
| fine out of the box in Firefox)
|
| Besides the ordinary world, the grip on the developer community
| is also lost. Increasingly, I'm seeing developers coding up demos
| and experiments that break in Firefox, it's not even considered
| at all, where just a few years ago it was a developer-default
| browser.
|
| It's an extremely harsh reality check. Effectively Apple, an
| enemy of the open web, is our only savior against a full Chromium
| monopoly. Apple actively sabotaging and blocking the progress of
| the web, is our "hope". How bad can it get?
|
| Anyway, I'm sorry to bring this up, in particular in a release
| announcement. I bring it up because I believe impact is central
| to the discussion and trumps any feature and any engineering. If
| the crash is not reversed somehow, it is inevitable that very
| hard questions have to be answered.
|
| It's not what I would want. I hope an independent implementation
| will keep existing forever.
| joelthelion wrote:
| As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on
| Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly
| rare on mobile. Why not use it?
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I'm wondering as well. Back when I used Android, I did use FF
| all the time, with uBO saving big time on traffic. Now on the
| iPhone I use Safari because I think it has power efficiency
| nailed, but maybe I should use FF for iOS instead?
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| The lead developer has open contempt for the users, for one
| thing. Also, anyone with a few neurons to rub together can
| tell the UI is absolutely terrible from a functional
| perspective. Form over function, on a browser whose target
| demographic was supposed to be power users (long ago, in the
| misty past).
| wyre wrote:
| Because Chrome comes standard on Android and Firefox has
| little marketing.
| fleddr wrote:
| Not an Android user, but I can speculate about reasons.
|
| Most people don't install browsers. They barely know what a
| browser is. So they use the one pushed to them, or the one
| familiar with. In the case of Android, I believe Google
| Chrome is typically shipped as the default browser.
|
| And as it works fine, there's no incentive to install
| anything else. I doubt young/new internet users would even
| know about Firefox.
|
| If not set as default browser already, Google pushes it from
| widely popular services like Youtube.
|
| Bottom line, Google can reach billions of people, Mozilla
| none.
|
| Please remember this: people do NOT chose browsers, compare
| them, pick their favorite. They do none of these things. It's
| a collective illusion by us tech folks.
| AlexSW wrote:
| To add to the comments not mentioned any UX reasons, I wanted
| to use Firefox on my phone as I do on my desktop and laptop
| but when using it I disliked the tab organisation compared to
| Chrome, and that's pretty much all I need the Web browser to
| be good for on my phone, where I'll often have up to 100 tabs
| open. Maybe it's changed now but Firefox had an impractical
| 3D scroll through tabs showing only the top IIRC, whereas
| Chrome has a much more practical grid of page previews that
| allowed for easy navigation. It also now allows one to group
| tabs very nicely.
|
| I hope Firefox has changed, or that there's a setting hidden
| away somewhere for these.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| Firefox has never had a 3d tab view on Android. It has had
| a grid or list view. Pretty sure the same is true on iOS
| but I don't use it as often as Android.
| aembleton wrote:
| > In our dashboards, Firefox does not even exist.
|
| Where are your dashboards getting the data from?
|
| I use Firefox, but like many Firefox users I use uBlockOrigin
| so I block requests to trackers like Google Analytics and
| StatCounter.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Oh it's absolutely dead man walking at this point. Just a
| question of when they finally decide to admit it, turn off the
| lights and go home.
| fleddr wrote:
| That's a crude way to put it, but yes, I can't see how this
| can go on. With limited resources, trying to keep up with
| giants speeding away from you, whilst market share keeps
| shrinking.
|
| I'm trying to think of a good exit plan, but I don't see any.
|
| Switching to Chromium, which would be a humiliating defeat,
| solves nothing. Chromium + privacy is Brave.
|
| Donating the entire project to the larger open source
| community won't do miracles either. It's highly questionable
| how many contributions will be made, but that's not the real
| problem.
|
| The real problem is that there's no reach. It's not an
| engineering problem. If you can't push a browser as a default
| or plug it from a billion user platform, you're out of the
| game.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Firefox needs to become the default browser for web
| developers.
|
| They need to go all-in on developer tooling.
|
| The manifest v3 issue may help by poaching technical users
| from chrome.
|
| They also need to stop being so "principled" about features
| such as WebMidi. If I have to keep another browser around
| certain websites that Firefox is too principled to support
| then why bother using Firefox at all.
| yborg wrote:
| FF market share isn't a technical or ideological issue - it's
| marketing and platform capture. Chrome is the new IE and has
| the entire Google ecosystem tied in with it to make it a
| compelling platform. They were also smart to push the
| Chromebook into schools so a couple of generations of kids grew
| up with The Web = Google Chrome. Microsoft installs Edge by
| default on Windows. These two companies alone have hundreds of
| times the resources of Mozilla. And the resources they do have
| they apply to things like Mitchell Baker's compensation.
| Without any effort to gain mindshare, the technical an social
| merits of Firefox are irrelevant.
|
| This isn't something you can grass-roots with a 3% share, you
| need influencers to broadcast, and that pretty much means you
| have to lay out some money. Unless maybe you can get Elon to
| shill Firefox in a tweet or something...
| aceazzameen wrote:
| I wish Firefox had a better mobile experience, which might help
| entice new users through word of mouth. Their biggest issue (on
| mobile at least) isn't speed, it's the UX.
|
| Obviously, they'll always be gimped on iOS unless something
| changes there. But the latest Android version still doesn't
| have feature parity to Firefox 68. And Firefox 68 wasn't
| perfect either. Some simple UX issues with current versions
| come to mind: All basic browser functionality is hidden behind
| a kebab menu, pull-to-refresh isn't live yet, if the toolbar is
| at the top then the new tab button is still at the bottom, the
| length of a drag to dismiss a tab is too long, tab management
| in general, etc.
|
| General users just won't bother with a browser that has an
| inferior UX to Chrome. Mozilla really needs to analyze browser
| affordances, specifically Chrome's, and look at how they can
| make it better, because Chrome isn't perfect either. It needs
| to be a top priority, so they can use mobile as a gateway for
| desktop installs. Ad-blocking is all it's got going for it on
| mobile, and that's not good enough for general users to
| convert.
|
| All that being said, I love the desktop experience. But they're
| hurting their brand on mobile, and they don't even know it.
| greazy wrote:
| I'm not sure if you've used FF on mobile recently but the
| last update was good change to UX. Personally I prefer FF
| over Chrome on mobile. It's all I use now on mobile and
| rarely do I notice a difference.
|
| I think FF is relegated in people's minds to being broken on
| mobile. Which it was a while ago but now it's solid.
| ozcanberkciftci wrote:
| i think they don't have a chance except just targeting power-
| users
| boba7 wrote:
| Are they still removing features and not fixing bugs?
| vernie wrote:
| Does any browser these days support multi-row tabs? I used to use
| Tab Mix Plus on Firefox but it seems like everyone (Chrome,
| Firefox, Safari) has adopted WebExtensions which are incapable of
| this.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Not quite the same, but:
|
| Vivaldi has 2 rows of tabs... the 1st row is "tab group" tabs,
| the 2nd row are the tabs in that group. Easy to
| manipulate/group them.
|
| You could also try tabs on the left edge (vs top).
| tapoxi wrote:
| I think Firefox has ~5% of our user base. It's hard to justify
| running separate tests for it anymore. I wish they'd just become
| a privacy-focused Chromium fork because I don't see them crawling
| back to a meaningful marketshare at this rate.
|
| (Yeah I know multiple implementations and all that, but we don't
| have many people running FreeBSD just to give Linux some
| competition.)
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I would be very sad if Firefox switched to Chromium. Not just
| for standards-reasons, but because Firefox, with some
| userstyles tweaking, supports multiple rows of tabs, which
| Chromium-based browsers cannot do. Also keyboard-based
| navigation shortcuts are much better, unclear to how much that
| has to do with Chromium or not.
|
| Also I'm not sure if Chromium-based browsers support the full
| extent of uBlock Origin.
| fgonzag wrote:
| Were you around during the IE and ActiveX days? Because that's
| what happens when a single vendor gets to dictate web
| standards.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| You say that like Google doesn't pretty much already dictate
| web standards.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Firefox is more like 8-9% of the desktop market. It's hard for
| alternative browsers to hold share on mobile where the defaults
| are set by the platform owners.
| everdrive wrote:
| > wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork
| because
|
| These already exist, and Chromium is far from perfect. I'm glad
| there's a viable competitor.
| buu700 wrote:
| In my experience, Firefox actually has better performance
| than Chrome nowadays -- particularly on Apple Silicon, where
| the difference is stark and dramatic. And with the new
| "Proton" interface, IMO Firefox finally looks at least as
| nice as Chrome out of the box.
|
| Firefox mobile still has some catching up to do on the
| overall UI/UX, but it's not _too_ far off, and the fact that
| it allows extensions is nice.
| mu_ddib wrote:
| this is interesting - i've had the opposite experience on
| both x86 and ARM Macs to the extent that it's not really a
| viable browser for me :/ purely anecdotal of course, and i
| haven't found a lot of information supporting my
| experience...
| awoimbee wrote:
| But chrome uses the GPU a lot more, thus making everything
| faster. Firefox right now is like Linux a few years back:
| better CPU performance but little to no GPU acceleration
| coder543 wrote:
| > But chrome uses the GPU a lot more
|
| [citation needed]
|
| Firefox page rendering _is_ GPU accelerated. It 's called
| WebRender. Your information seems to be out of date.
|
| Article from 2017 when WebRender was still being prepared
| for release: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-
| web-at-maximum-f...
|
| Current platform support list, which seems to be "almost
| everyone":
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where
| tehbeard wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd classify it as viable with how Mozilla
| middle management has acted the last few years.
| nicoburns wrote:
| It's at least technically viable for now
| handrous wrote:
| Safari and, especially, its iOS monopoly (for the engine, at
| least) are the only thing keeping Google from dominating and
| nearly everyone from _only_ testing against Chrome, now that
| MS switched to using Chrome 's engine and IE is finally
| nearing the end even in the important niches where it had
| been hanging on. FF doesn't have enough "normies" using it,
| isn't the default anywhere, and its trend-line is heading the
| wrong direction.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I wish more people would run FreeBSD because it would make both
| Linux and FreeBSD stronger.
|
| Single platforms stagnate, we've seen it before with IE6 and
| we're starting to see it again.
| tristor wrote:
| Ironically, as much as I love FreeBSD, I am being forced to
| migrate to Linux because the USB mass storage support on
| FreeBSD is broken on Dell rack servers. I recently migrated
| to a newer generation Dell server w/ 16TB disks to replace my
| aging fleet of R710s and cut my power usage considerably, and
| found I could no longer reliably keep a server online if I
| boot from USB. There's several threads about this on the
| FreeBSD forums, including one I started, and the general
| consensus of the community is "don't do that thing you're
| doing that works perfectly fine on every other OS, even
| Windows." not "FreeBSD is broken and this bug should be
| fixed."
|
| I've fought the good fight for FreeBSD for more than a
| decade, and my last system running it is getting Debian
| installed on it in the near-term future.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Single platforms stagnate, we've seen it before with IE6
| and we're starting to see it again.
|
| They do, but at least chromium is open source. If it
| stagnated like IE6 then someone would fork it.
| foepys wrote:
| > someone would fork it.
|
| This myth needs to die. Yes, somebody would fork it but it
| would very, very quickly become stale as well. It costs
| tens of millions to develop a browser engine nowadays, it's
| not something a few hobbyists can develop in the evening
| after their day job.
|
| Microsoft didn't choose Chromium for their new Edge engine
| because they love Google, they chose it purely from an
| economic point of view. Even Microsoft doesn't want to
| develop a browser engine. _Microsoft_.
| historyloop wrote:
| Google already singlehandedly controls the web standards.
| Firefox and Safari are the last obstacles to them basically
| privatizing the web.
|
| The independent Chromium distributions do very little to that
| effect, as they're not incentivized to specifically disable
| features Google puts in.
|
| If Firefox goes away, kiss the open web goodbye. We'll have it
| on paper, but just that. It'll be Google's web.
| tapoxi wrote:
| I mean sure, but realistically speaking, how can we afford to
| continue supporting Firefox? I can't make a plea to the CTO
| of "Please let us keep investing money in compatibility
| because it may have a minor impact on the open web."
|
| Firefox is in a downward trajectory for marketshare and
| mindshare. I would love to hear a realistic solution to this
| problem. Maybe switching to WebKit?
| hannob wrote:
| Given how many discussions I had in the past about people
| insisting to support legacy, unsupported browsers I'm
| surprised "5% of our users use it" isn't enough to convince
| almost everyone to support it.
| tapoxi wrote:
| If you mean Internet Explorer, it's because the
| deprecation of that is starting now because Edge supports
| IE mode for legacy apps and is otherwise Chromium.
| rvz wrote:
| It's a two horse race, and its Chrome vs Safari. Firefox is
| non-existent in this race and is so behind that Google pays
| hundreds of millions to its creator Mozilla, which
| contributes a significant amount to their entire revenue
| source.
|
| I hate to be the one to bring in 'the facts' but Firefox
| itself is becoming more irrelevant and there is no question
| on that. Microsoft Edge (using Chromium) is used more than
| Firefox [0] and global Firefox usage has been declining ever
| since. [1]
|
| As I said before [2] the Chrome ecosystem has given Google
| the dominance of more than just the web standards and the web
| developers were happy to live with this.
|
| I'd say the so called 'open web' just exchanged from one
| behemoth to another.
|
| To Downvoters: So _' Firefox is the most used and dominant
| browser and Chrome is in second place'_? So _' Google is not
| paying Firefox in the millions'_? I strongly disagree and can
| confidently say that Firefox usage is dying. Change my mind.
|
| I have just given credible sources to substantiate my claims
| yet no counter arguments or disproving the facts are
| presented towards my comment.
|
| [0] https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-just-left-
| a-se...
|
| [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop-
| mobi...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769206
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Safari is the real alternative keeping web open. Firefox does
| not serve that role anymore.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Safari is only available on one platform (that
| internationally has a small market share) and isn't all
| that great about implementing web standards in a timely
| manner. To me, Firefox is the far better alternative. But
| really, why should there be only one?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Safari is used by rich people who can afford iPhones and
| Macs. Those people are valuable visitors for many
| websites. And Safari marketshare (with iOS) is not tiny.
| So plenty of websites do care about Safari compatibility.
| historyloop wrote:
| > isn't all that great about implementing web standards
| in a timely manner.
|
| It's not good at implementing standards in timely manner
| which Chrome implements before they're even standards
| (and then become standards when Google pushes them to
| become so). Interesting isn't it. That literally goes
| back to what I said.
|
| Without Firefox and Safari, Google can declare anything
| it wants a standard and implement it LITERALLY yesterday.
|
| Among standards Safari is slow to implement in "timely
| manner" is web pages connecting to USB devices, Bluetooth
| and a plethora of other nonsense which Google keeps
| pushing through because they want the web to be the
| application OS for everyone, and then slap ads on it.
| astrange wrote:
| "Implementing web standards" is Chrome's strategy for
| becoming a browser monopoly. They just constantly make up
| things like USB in web browsers faster than anyone else
| could implement it.
|
| Just because they standardize it doesn't mean anyone
| should be forced to keep up with them.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Safari is available on one platform but its engine is
| cross-platform and used by few browsers (Epiphany,
| Luakit, Nyxt, Vimb, ...).
| deregulateMed wrote:
| A closed browser with limited features made by a unethical
| company is keeping the web open?
|
| I'll take FOSS chromium variants before I give my data to
| Apple(and by proxy, the US and Chinese government).
| historyloop wrote:
| > unethical company
|
| Unless there's a mathematical definition of "ethical"
| that we can rely on for objective assessment, that's
| basically everyone and no one based on how you feel any
| particular day.
| rvz wrote:
| > made by a unethical company is keeping the web open?
|
| There are no angels with the known contenders of "keeping
| the web open" unless you want to use SerenityOS's web
| browser that they made themselves.
|
| Unless you are using a very exotic OS that has a browser,
| I'm not sure how you can begin to defend a chromium
| variant still derived by an unethical company (Because
| you have to update that fork) and then attack another
| unethical company for giving your data to them.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Honestly I'm still not used to the new tab style that was
| introduced last time. 90 seems fine, but not much to get excited
| about from the user perspective.
| wnevets wrote:
| does anyone know of an about:config to the switch tab style
| back? Its still hard for me to notice which style is actually
| selected with Dark Mode
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| You need to set browser.proton.enabled to false. There's a
| number of browser.proton.*.enabled settings for various parts
| of the UI as well.
| tsjq wrote:
| thanks. that's helpful.
| phit_ wrote:
| loving 'Firefox-UI-Fix' which fixes all the density changes
| introduced as well https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/
| sharps1 wrote:
| Agreed - this makes the ui much better.
|
| It's annoying have to manually enable compact in about:config
| to get back to the compact layout in new profiles.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I remember seeing a lot of complaining about the tabs in the
| last release thread but they dont seem to bother me at all.
|
| What is the issue with the new tabs?
| shakow wrote:
| IMHO, they're pretty, but waste quite some space for no gain
| apart prettinnes.
| commoner wrote:
| There is a petition on the Mozilla Ideas forum to retain
| the "Compact" interface option, which would conserve space
| in the tab bar:
|
| https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/719764
| _ph_ wrote:
| The missing partition between tabs irritates me greatly.
| Especially as the label of the tab fades out to the right,
| there is no indication for the exact x-space taken up by a
| tab. The only fixed thing is the favicon. Furthermore, the
| fading out of the text is greatly irritating me. My vision is
| the best and I constantly try to focus on those parts but
| they are not out of focus, but faded out. Just a vertical
| separator of some sorts would help with visibility in my eyes
| (literally! :p)
| starik36 wrote:
| They bothered me greatly on the first day. To the point where
| I started messing around with userChrome.css to change them
| back.
|
| I was fine the second day. I think it was just a case of
| someone moving my cheese unexpectedly.
| conradfr wrote:
| What was wrong with the old ones?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Personally, very very personally, I don't like the look, I
| prefer all my apps to be themed by the OS and to use the
| underlying widgets. That's not how FF is built though but
| that's okay since when they do bring change like that I still
| can user userchrome (I still can user userChrome, right ?)
| /meme.
| Proven wrote:
| The new style is bullshit.
|
| I've switched to ESR which still uses old tabs and I'll
| completely get rid of it once it gets updated to the new tab
| style.
| akho wrote:
| The tab bar is functionally useless if you have > 10 tabs open,
| so I don't even know why I'd notice. Aesthetically, it's fine
| for me.
|
| Option to hide it completely (replacing with a mobile-style
| full-screen modal view with properly sized previews and
| keyboard navigation / fuzzy finding if you allow me to dream)
| would be nice.
| efraim wrote:
| You can use ctrl-tab to switch between tabs and it shows a
| thumbnail of each page.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, I'm fine with them taking up more vertical space, but
| it's the reduction in horizontal space that most hurts
| usability, especially with more icons that show up now next
| to the favicons, further reducing available space. It's still
| better/preferable than Chromium/Chrome's awful shrinking tabs
| horizontally down all the way to just favicons when you have
| a lot of tabs, but it's getting close to feeling that
| cramped.
|
| (I also though have moved a lot of my day-to-day tab
| switching to Tree Style Tabs, though. I'd probably be angrier
| if I was already using an add-on like that.)
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I started using Tree Style Tab to manage them, and I like
| that very much. I agree, a mobile-style manager would be
| interesting.
| brynjolf wrote:
| Window management is still horrible in Firefox, meaning if
| I want to close all Hacker news tabs in all open windows no
| add on seems to handle it properly. Chrome has added built
| in search of tabs across windows though, would love the
| same for Firefox
| Nadya wrote:
| Sounds a bit like you'd like Tab Groups. I used Tab Groups
| extensively until that functionality was ripped out and put
| into a shitty, poorly maintained, broken add-on. A quick
| Ctrl+Shift+E and I could organize everything into
| work/research/gaming/wikis/whatever and quickly search all
| tabs or within a specific tab group to switch tabs. The
| add-on kind of works but isn't as feature complete and from
| my experience was pretty buggy and wouldn't properly
| maintain my groups between sessions sometimes.
|
| Honestly web browsers have been in a steady decline for me
| ever since FF34~ish with the exception of better modern
| CSS/JS support. They kill features and functionality I use
| extensively and rarely provide any alternatives. Few of my
| browser extensions even work since FF killed off all old
| addons. It forced me to use Chrome and now Chrome is
| looking like they'll be killing off a good number of
| extensions I use in the near future. Can't have a browser
| for power-users because power-users don't make up enough
| market share. _sigh_
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > until that functionality was ripped out and put into a
| shitty, poorly maintained, broken add-on.
|
| Since you didn't quite say it explicitly: The real insult
| was that they factored it out into an extension, _and
| then promptly broke the extension by ripping out the API
| surface it needed_.
| Nadya wrote:
| I didn't say it explicitly because I never bothered
| digging deeply into why it became so terrible - after
| being burned enough times by FF during that time period I
| decided to bite the bullet and switch over to Chrome
| since at my experience was at least more stable/had less
| breakage every update. Ironically enough it seems Chrome
| may be pushing some Extension API changes that will break
| things and force me to go back to Firefox.
|
| It's gotten to a point where I'd gladly use an old,
| insecure browser with features I like that enables a
| workflow I'm comfortable with than being force to use a
| more secure browser with all the features gutted or
| gimped. But I can't even do that because then every other
| site refuses to serve me content unless I update my
| browser to a supported version.
| akho wrote:
| I use tridactyl's `:b` often. No previews, no fullscreen,
| no fuzzy matching, but at least full titles and word
| search.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm still not adjusted to it and will probably never be.
| [deleted]
| Hamuko wrote:
| I just made mine look like the old black tab bar again with
| userChrome.css.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I ended up just turning the tab bar off and using the Tree
| Tabs extension
| aendruk wrote:
| An example for the curious:
|
| https://gist.github.com/7accb09dbddd494f53dc889877c1f524
| bergheim wrote:
| I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know
| why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and
| center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my
| friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They
| care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having
| Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital
| world looks like, is now _way worse_ than what Microsoft with IE6
| ever did. They had their share, but nothing compared to this. At
| least Microsoft was just a software company.
|
| If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many
| brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open
| source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I
| really don't see how any other part of our species could.
| "Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about
| Firefox". I see these comments all the time here. Even in this
| thread.
|
| Firefox. Linux. Postgresql. Wikipedia. Xmms! The WORLD WIDE WEB!
| Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN (funny how
| Google made their initial fortunes). AMP would be the least of
| your worries. Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. All of
| these open source projects are just mindblowingly awesome. They
| help people. Me. You.
|
| But who cares right? Certainly not the lot with money in the
| 80/90s that didn't understand how or why this would be important.
| Which is why all these amazing things happened. Now they do of
| course. So none of this anymore.
|
| Which is why I think humanity is doomed to succumb to our
| newfound overlords. The Big Four. Five? Six? Seven? Who cares
| really. A handful.
|
| I wish people, especially like what this place definitely
| represents, would stand up more (including me!). Teach people,
| politicians, your parents, your siblings, your kids. We
| understand tech and it's implications. We understand how big tech
| is now stifling everything. Good luck training a neural network
| that competes with 50 billion uploaded photos. Facebook, Amazon.
| Google. Microsoft.
|
| But noone will - "it doesn't matter". But make no mistake. It
| does matter. And humanity is just sitting here. It's like we're
| heading for this High Class Great Filter.
|
| Good thing I'll be dead before all this comes to full fruition.
|
| (Sorry for the rant - hope it was still relevant and on point,
| and I really encourage discussion here!)
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| The general mass of humanity never does things because they're
| "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc.
| They do them because they're easy. To the extent that wide
| social change ever happens, it only happens because the path of
| least resistance shifted from one thing to another. If you
| despair for the actions of the masses, never try to reason with
| them. Skip straight to assembling a good marketing campaign. I
| admire the spirit, but nobody's going to "stand up" and fight
| the good fight. Most people are only capable of being
| consumers. If you want them to change, give them something more
| attractive to consume. These are the rules of the game.
|
| Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners
| are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically,
| and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve
| ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to
| build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a
| browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without
| being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the
| differences become more superficial with each release, and I
| wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for
| Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to
| signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the
| Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| I sense some cognitive dissonance between your two
| paragraphs. In the first you argue for a focus on consumerism
| and marketing, in the second you criticize Firefox for
| competing by appealing to styles and trends.
| voidnullnil wrote:
| If the internet as it is right now was what was put forth as
| the initial internet experiment, one would wonder what kind of
| shit for brains thought this up. I honestly cannot comprehend
| how people can talk about software without "fuck off" being
| used as a greeting. Firefox and Chrome are not even usable. The
| people who claim they are, are either nerds tunnel visioned and
| hyped on some super specific thing like their latest sandbox
| thing or CSS feature, or someone who spent a lot of money on
| their computer and are desperate to prove they have a premium
| experience. My parents don't think browsers are usable. Nobody
| I know IRL does, aside from my most consumerish friends who see
| buying digital goods as a the new drinking beer. They feel like
| they are gettign some premium state of the art protection when
| they idiotically crouch over their phone to enter the 500th SMS
| based 2FA (read: snakeoil garbage used as a bandaid to fix mind
| numbingly insecure software on the client as well as the
| server) token of the day. All it takes to remove the current
| web is to make something that has a UI at least as good as a 30
| year old toaster. Insane bugs aside, all modern software GUIs
| are slow and unresponsive as hell. A layman trying an actual
| good alternative will understand its better without needing to
| know why. Modern web UX design is pure garbage, but it's not
| much worse than initial web 2.0 design. Everything is a
| clusterfuck of, "oh can I do this?" 403, "huh I guess not", and
| "how do I do this? oh there is no button for that? it would be
| really simple why did they not add this? oh, because it's not
| relevant to the company's revenue model?".
|
| tl;dr we need the Firefox of Firefox
|
| The web should be static documents. <video> is still something
| that can go in a static document. There is no need to execute
| someone's poorly written application hacked together in a
| <script> tag to view documents in some unreadble form where the
| text constantly flickers on and off (to gracefully upgrade or
| whatever it's doing) as they try to impress you with their
| "type" knowledge. By definition, the majority of websites must
| be poorly written since there are not as many good programmers
| as content creators, and the default is for websites to be
| loaded via a JS in a JS in a JS. Note also how browsers like
| Firefox and Chrome (and moslty the old web specs) try as hard
| as possible to make default CSS look horrible. 99% of my usage
| of the web is for viewing articles, and unfortunately banking
| which for some reason chooses to implement their online service
| in the most insecure possible way.
|
| tl;dr the web should be static documents
|
| Now the next problem is that all content has to be hosted on a
| server that is paid for by someone, and they even pay for a
| stupid string in the URL bar. Well I guess I should say the web
| is for commercial content and not for humans (btw, it's a
| common misconception to claim domain names are human friendly).
| If the web was on something like IPFS or Freenet, then anyone
| could make their own website. This brings the web back to what
| it is about: sharing information (which is an entirely
| different concept than trying to compose content that will
| bring the most revenue). However, there is a big problem with
| this: the American police state doesn't like people sharing
| files. They prop up false dilemmas like that some rich
| company's "music" can be illegally shared. If such p2p web
| materializes, the american police state will be finding new
| ways to arrest random people and make everything as
| insufferable as possible. I have tried to host websites
| recently and basically the only place you can do this is on
| github.io (I do not want to pay money for hosting a website,
| because domain names are literal garbage, electronic payments
| are literally garbage, and having my IRL identity tied to stuff
| I post online is literally garbage. i do not understand the new
| trend of using your real identity online other than to promote
| yourself aka make bad bait content), and then it's not certain
| if some idiot who has no right to moderate what I say decides
| to remove my articles discussing old patched security
| vulnerabilities. Plus github.io makes zero profit so they might
| just remove my stuff at some point (whereas I could just keep
| it up forever without changing URL on IPFS or Freenet, and it
| would stay up forever as long as people or even just I care
| about it, but nobody uses either).
|
| tl;dr the web should be content addressable and 'murica should
| stop pretending uploading bits of data is a problem, so people
| can actually post their websites
|
| Corporations cannot comprehend this because they reason in
| terms of graphs of consumer happiness and competing with the 3
| products that are 0.001% different than theirs. Corporations
| cannot innovate because the employee spends all his life
| chasing simple goals laid out by his boss who puts in the
| minmal effort to define what the goals should be while making
| it look like he is a better boss than his competitors.
| Corporations do not require their developers to understand any
| engineering concepts, they just need to be able to fill tick
| boxes of features.
|
| tl;dr literally anyone competent can beat big tech
| peakaboo wrote:
| Good post. I've given up on the tech community though. They
| don't care about what's right. If chrome is faster, they use
| chrome.
| xpressvideoz wrote:
| The time I lost my faith in Firefox was when the CEO of Mozilla
| got a huge pay increase, whilst firing many technical people at
| the same time. How can a tech company improve their product
| without those technical people? Oh, never mention the ever-
| decreasing number of Firefox users. Weren't the C-level people
| responsible for that?
|
| Anyway, that was the moment when I realized Mozilla was just
| another company, not a flagship open source advocator or
| something. They're not even pretending anymore. Look at the
| sneaky attempts to integrate ads on Firefox. Look at the user
| experience being degraded every year. They are not listening to
| me, so I decided to not listen to them.
| bennysomething wrote:
| How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided
| the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon
| Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way
| easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business. I no longer
| use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome
| gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly
| through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fast. Also I'm pretty
| certain Google fund a lot of Firefox Dev.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to
| the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their
| vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause
| harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm.
|
| What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet
| anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight
| major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit
| is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast
| sea of individual sites, small communities and small
| businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing.
| Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two
| hands to count.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| Actually much of the "hardware advances" were engineered with
| public money: internet, GPS, GSM, GPRS, battery, touchscreen
| etc. Big tech certainly takes more than it gives back in
| taxes. Even worse, some are polluting the planet with their
| unrepairable e-waste.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I am pretty much as anti-big-tech as it can get, but I
| can't lie to myself: YouTube has improved the world
| tremendously and provided me with tens of thousands of
| dollars of value. I cannot even fathom.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Just remember that Mozilla gets over 90% of its revenue from
| Google.
| tester756 wrote:
| so what?
|
| ofc Google wants FF to be *viable*, but not good.
| foxpurple wrote:
| Probably for legal reasons. Firefox exists so chrome is not
| a monopoly and stricter government action is not taken.
|
| Google doesn't give money to control Firefox, they just
| need it to exist.
| 40four wrote:
| That doesn't mean anything. It's a tired attack that gets
| repeated over and over, but has nothing to do with the values
| and goals Mozilla/ Firefox represent.
| berniemadoff69 wrote:
| I think if I learned Greenpeace was single-handedly funded
| by Exxon, my reaction wouldn't be to say 'that doesnt mean
| anything'
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Also remember that at the same time Google did everything
| they could to make sure Firefox market share would be as low
| as possible.
|
| See https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686
| and the billions spent in Chrome marketing, bundling with
| other software, and the free ads on Google properties.
| exceptione wrote:
| This tells you how dire the situation is at this moment. If
| you would view the open web as an ecosystem, we might be on
| the verge of a total collapse of it.
|
| Maybe we should create and broadcast documentaries about it,
| think BBC Earth style, and watch ourselves and the
| governments ignore the lessons of it.
| walrus01 wrote:
| the future is a walled garden stepping on a face, forever.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Thanks for a good spank. HN needs one once in a while.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains
| to democracy and human values
|
| It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to
| my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism,
| but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn't
| embody neutrality or democracy.
|
| They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion
| on gay marriage, and a private donation in that matter is
| grounds to fire someone. Given their clear left leaning on
| other public stances, I think activists on the right should be
| wary of sudden account deletion if they store data with Mozilla
| (e.g. the password vault).
|
| Not that they could trust Google either, of course. But
| neutrality would be much better if we mention democracy.
| astrange wrote:
| There's no reason to dig up every opinion on Earth just so
| you can maintain neutrality between all of them.
|
| Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled for a guy who
| thinks his employees shouldn't be able to visit their spouses
| dying in hospitals[1]. He's literally still around.
|
| [1] Which happened a lot during the AIDS pandemic and was
| essentially the purpose of the gay marriage campaign. It was
| actually relatively culturally conservative; super-liberal SF
| gay people wouldn't want nuclear families after all, they'd
| want to live in communes or something.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Eich would tell you he supported civil unions.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Feel free to agree or disagree with Mozilla, obviously.
|
| However, I suggest skipping the extra and disingenous step of
| pretending there's some objective universal standard of
| "neutrality."
|
| Your "neutral" may be somebody else's idea of "left" or
| "right."
|
| What you're doing here makes as much sense as inventing some
| arbitrary personal definition of "rock and roll music" and
| then criticizing some performer for not hewing closely enough
| to it.
| t-writescode wrote:
| 1: democracy isn't neutral, it tends to follow the will of
| the people
|
| 2: Why should I care about the politics of the software
| company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say
| they have regarding my privacy and making the best product
| possible?
| fleddr wrote:
| It depends on whether the topic is divisive or not.
|
| Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are
| not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that.
|
| Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part
| of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights,
| advancing the black community with special projects.
|
| Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter
| where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how
| they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized
| political landscape.
|
| If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one
| should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of
| abandoning part of the potential user base.
|
| Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what
| Mozilla really is these days.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many
| brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open
| source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I
| really don't see how any other part of our species could.
|
| Not sure how that is relevant to Firefox vs Chromium debate.
| Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.
| toper-centage wrote:
| For a project as massive as a browser, being open source is
| vastly irrelevant. Only major companies are able to truly
| maintain a browser these days. You can fork Chrome, sure, but
| you won't get anywhere with it. Chromium is Google.
| wayneftw wrote:
| Chromium has ~5 million lines of code.
|
| The Linux kernel has ~28 million lines of code.
|
| We also very much have a monoculture with the Linux kernel
| and society hasn't collapsed.
| zerop wrote:
| Any article/guide on how big open source projects like firefox,
| Linux kernel are released? I believe developers around world
| contribute to code. What's testing, release process like? How to
| they manage it?
| bugmen0t wrote:
| Hi. Firefox developer speaking here. Feel free to take a look
| at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Process
| and https://aosabook.org/en/ffreleng.html. The latter is quite
| outdated but some core assumptions are still valid. Our CI is
| hosted at https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=autoland .
| Every patch that is uploaded will be tested before and after it
| goes into a branch. Firefox Nightly ships directly from that
| branch. The changes will be "promoted" to Beta (and
| subsequently Release) every four weeks. Our community hangs out
| on Matrix and is very Open to newcomer questions and other
| contributors. In fact, we Vene have an introduction channel and
| list good first bugs on bugzilla (searchable through something
| called "Codetribute")
| [deleted]
| yboris wrote:
| The feature I'm most looking forward to is _JPEG XL_ or .jxl
| (pronounced "jixel") - the new image format that will replace
| JPEG in 2022.
|
| It's in Firefox nightly: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl but the
| sooner it's in the regular release, the sooner we can all start
| experimenting with it and using it.
|
| https://jpegxl.info/
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > The "Open Image in New Tab" context menu item now opens images
| and media in a background tab by default. Learn more
|
| Ahaaaa ! Yes !
|
| I could have sworn it had been the default behavior and it got
| changed at some point but I never bothered to track that down.
| Can anyone confirm ?
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| So based on the _Learn more_ link it basically now follows what
| links do. It 'll have been better if images and links had a
| different option. (And it'll have been much better if _View
| image_ hadn 't been removed.)
| sp332 wrote:
| If you held ctrl, it would open in a new tab. But now, holding
| ctrl does not open the image in the current tab.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The default was the same tab until Firefox 88. They changed it
| to a new tab to match Chrome. And removed the same tab option
| because they couldn't imagine why anyone would want it.[1]
|
| [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c3
| Avery3R wrote:
| If you middle clicked the view in same tab button it would
| open the link in a background tab instead of the same one.
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah I did that all the time and the recent change was a
| regression to me. Now with Firefox 90 I can finally
| comfortably open things in a background tab again.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Thanks for the Bugzilla link. It's making me think that I
| should log in to my Bugzilla account more often and look out
| for issues/requests such as this one.
|
| It's not uncommon for image-hosting sites to use _width_ and
| _height_ attributes or _max-height_ / _max-width_ styles to
| get browsers to display high resolution images at a smaller
| size than the native image (I can often tell by how long it
| takes for the images to load in the browser). I liked being
| able to right-click on a image and click the "View image"
| option from the context menu to open the image in the same
| tab - at its native resolution. On the much rarer occasion,
| where there were multiple images on the same page, it was
| useful to be able to middle-click to open the image in a new
| background tab.
|
| I was annoyed that they removed this ability in Firefox 88
| but now I'm doubly disappointed to discover that the reason
| was to be more like Chrome. It seems kind of pointless to
| break decades old functionality just so that there's even
| less to differentiate Firefox from competing browsers. I
| understand that it's good to maintain consistent UI but just
| because other mainstream browsers change decades-old
| behaviour in a particular way doesn't mean that _all_
| browsers should do so. Having said that, Mike Hoye provides a
| reasoned rationale1 for many of the recent Firefox UI changes
| that have annoyed and frustrated long-time Firefox users.
|
| At least now, with Firefox 90, they've changed the new image
| tab from being a foreground tab to a background tab: this
| should be less annoying.
|
| On a related note, I've now had enough time to get used to
| automatically selecting 'L' (instead of 'A') when I want to
| copy a URL into the clipboard
| (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324). I can
| live with - and adapt to - such changes if the original
| functionality isn't completely removed.
|
| Also, I ensure that telemetry is switched on so developers
| are aware that that users make use of such functionality.
| Though, in this case, they can't tell the difference between
| users right-clicking and choosing "View image" because they
| explicitly wanted the image in the same tab or because it was
| the default behaviour. Unfortunately, the UX experts seem to
| have simply divined that the users who were selecting the
| "View image" option didn't _really_ want the pre-existing,
| long-standing behaviour (open in the same tab.
|
| 1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c77
| bserge wrote:
| It's standard behaviour on middle mouse button click which I
| use.
| dopu wrote:
| Excited that there's more progress being done in implementing
| proper site isolation. Would be great to not feel like I'm losing
| something in sticking with FF over Chromium-based browsers.
| fsflover wrote:
| If you need real security through isolation, try Qubes OS.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| For isolation within a Linux instance:
|
| firejail, firetools
|
| apt-cache search firejail
| sambe wrote:
| Does Chrome have better site isolation?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Background updates! Hooray! That may sound like a basic table
| stakes feature but honestly it's a huge improvement. And a lot of
| other apps do a terrible job of it, particularly on Windows. It's
| remarkable how many apps require 8, 10 mouse clicks and a restart
| to install a minor update. Firefox didn't require any clicks but
| the nag / need to restart was a nuisance.
|
| Actually now that I type that I wonder what has changed. I guess
| the upgrade appears to happen faster because it was done before
| the restart? I assume Firefox itself still has to be restarted
| for the update to be effective.
|
| (No problem on a Windows system; the OS reboots itself so often
| Firefox is guaranteed to before too long :-P)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| This is about when Firefox isn't running. The background update
| as you take it to mean has been the case for about a decade.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| The key here is "while Firefox is not running." They have a
| maintenance service now that can check for updates when the
| browser is closed.
|
| Personally, I wish they hadn't done that. First, because my
| browser is always open. But also because I don't need another
| service.
| pieno wrote:
| The maintenance service is not checking for updates. It is
| still Firefox itself that checks for updates, but instead of
| launching the updater.exe (which triggers the UAC dialog),
| Firefox will start the maintenance service and tell the
| service there is a new update. The service will stop Firefox,
| run the updater to install the new version of Firefox (which
| does not require a UAC because the service already has
| elevated permissions), restart Firefox (updated version), and
| then stop itself. So this is not your typical update service
| such as Java or Adobe have which continuously runs in the
| background, but rather an interesting trick to run
| executables with elevated on-demand of a non-elevated
| executable.
| nly wrote:
| How does the service authenticate Firefox?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The service will stop Firefox, run the updater to install
| the new version of Firefox (which does not require a UAC
| because the service already has elevated permissions),
| restart Firefox (updated version), and then stop itself.
|
| The service asks before stopping Firefox? Also, what if I
| have private tabs open, does it retain those in the session
| when it restarts?
| dblohm7 wrote:
| That's not how it works, actually. The checks are done by a
| scheduled task.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Are you sure? The OP links to
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-
| maintenanc...
| dblohm7 wrote:
| The maintenance service is used to avoid UAC prompts
| during upgrades. That feature has been around for over a
| decade now.
|
| The background update stuff uses the Windows task
| scheduler to schedule update checks, not the maintenance
| service.
|
| (I used to work on the team that at the time owned this
| stuff)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| As sibling comment says the checks are a scheduled task. And
| it's opt-in so don't worry. You aren't forced to it.
| ukyrgf wrote:
| The only problem is their god awful "welcome to the new
| version! we care about privacy!" screen that comes up every
| other time you open the browser. I don't think anybody has ever
| seen one of those and thought it was delightful.
| jules-jules wrote:
| This might get lost but figure if someone knows about it it's
| here. Old Firefox allowed to double-click between two words and
| both would get highlighted. This has been removed in the newer
| versions. Does anybody know if it's possible to manually
| configure this?
| joecool1029 wrote:
| There's a 3 settings under layout.word_select in about:config.
| They unfortunately don't do what you're asking, but there is an
| open bug for this:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1706990
| jules-jules wrote:
| Thanks for digging this up! At least I wasn't the only one
| who seems to have made extensive use of this functionality.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| Not an answer but you can double-click on a single word, keep
| the button pressed and drag-select whole words. When you get
| used to it it's quite useful.
| ninjahattori wrote:
| I use and love firefox. I feel sad when I see brave, edge and
| other new browsers chromium based taking a lead.
|
| Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the company behind it
| lacks any kind of vision.
|
| Brave has its own search, a better startpage, an ad network. From
| onboarding to incentivising user, they are doing it all very
| well.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity.
|
| Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no
| point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook.
|
| This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required
| writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and
| Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than
| I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install
| Chrome" when something is misaligned or broken in Firefox or
| Safari.
|
| I wish I could say it's the project managers, sys admins or the
| executives who are to blame like in the IE6 days. But painfully
| it's just lazy or incompetent engineers who don't understand or
| care about the importance of open and standard tech.
|
| When asked to build something they all treat cross browser as
| an extra and not-essential step and then inflate their
| estimates or claim it will be quicker if we don't bother.
|
| Wish this was isolated to a few people but I feel I'm like 80
| young engineers deep who are like this and I think maybe 2 I've
| worked with in the past 7 years cared about cross browser.
|
| If your experience in the industry is different from this, I'm
| extremely envious.
| kunagi7 wrote:
| As someone who has worked in quite a lot of web projects for
| the last few years I noticed the big difference in
| requirements.
|
| Back when I started it was all about supporting IE7/IE8+,
| Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari (with an old iPad as a test
| device). A lot of polyfills were used to ease development and
| keeping older browsers alive. Testing on IE was quite painful
| (missing proper devtools, weird "Unknown Error!" alerts, slow
| scripts crashing the whole browser, browser implementation
| bugs, headaches with library conflicts, etc). I remember
| testing against hobby browsers like Pale Moon because things
| already worked fine.
|
| Nowadays it's just all about testing in Chrome and with less
| priority, Safari (mostly on iPad, iPhone). The requirement of
| testing against other browsers were dropped by most of
| clients. If a project has spare time fixes for those browsers
| are an extra. Most analytics tools don't even show anything
| else of Chrome/Chromiums and Safaris (desktop and mobile).
|
| So, even older engineers are slowly moving along with the
| newest generation and just test on Chrome and sometimes
| Safari. This days I just use a Chromium derivative, Vivaldi.
| It does the job and the UI speed has been improving quite a
| lot (but still lags a bit behind). If the project has some
| spare time I like to do some cross browser checks (most
| times, things just work fine). Sometimes I find an engineer
| using Firefox but most of the time they have a Chrome browser
| opened to test their work.
| fleddr wrote:
| I'm old school like you are, and morally agree with you.
|
| Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for
| the sake of argument, assume we do use web standards.
|
| It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards,
| that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all
| those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers
| behave better, but there still may be issues.
|
| We've long seen this as some diversity feature of the web,
| but it's a bug instead. It means millions of developers are
| spending time on the same non-value added activity every
| single time. It's a massive and ongoing waste of resources
| for everybody.
|
| (browser makers agree with the above, they all have a
| compatibility program addressing this)
|
| Second, "progressive enhancement" too has been embraced by
| the careful web developer as the right thing to do. It is.
| Yet it effectively means building the same thing twice. We've
| normalized doing that, but it's quite an unnatural approach
| not seen in any other tech platform I know of.
|
| (the above can be solved by browsers coordinating important
| standards in time, but generally they won't...often)
|
| Both issues above are time wasters and technical
| shortcomings. They still are the right thing to do, but an
| unwanted thing to do when adding pressure.
|
| And pressure we have. We're no longer in the cute web, this
| is the business web. Developers are very expensive and need
| to deliver more than ever. Time to market is shorter than
| ever.
|
| Any activity not directly contributing to time to market, is
| under severe pressure.
|
| Note that I still agree with your point about some/many
| engineers being lazy, indifferent. But I hope you appreciate
| this view still.
| Asooka wrote:
| If it doesn't work right in Firefox and Chrome, it's probably
| not standards-conformant and thus at a high probability of
| breaking when Chrome updates its layout engine. That's how
| I'd present the argument - making sure it works right across
| browsers makes your code robust against future changes in
| behaviour.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see
| no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook.
|
| And many in the older generation saw no point in testing
| anything but IE6 on Windows
| notriddle wrote:
| > But painfully it's just lazy or incompetent engineers
|
| There are good arguments in favor of testing and developing
| for Firefox, but that is not one of them.
|
| Representing the interests of the end-user, in a typical
| SCRUM-ish development house, is supposed to be the product
| owner's job, not the job of individual devs. If management
| isn't rewarding cross-browser development, then that's on
| management, or maybe even on the end-users. Not the devs.
| Expecting devs to put work into stuff that won't be rewarded
| by their bosses if they succeed, and will likely be punished
| if something goes wrong, is kinda silly.
|
| It probably doesn't matter that much, anyway. Firefox is
| being killed because some of the most popular websites on the
| internet are made by a competitor, the vertical monopoly
| between YouTube and Chrome. Everything else is just a
| distraction.
| kbelder wrote:
| One of the problems is that it isn't a choice between Good and
| Evil. (That's Mozilla and Google, if it wasn't clear...)
|
| When you look at Mozilla's leadership, it is not hard to be
| turned off by their actions. It certainly bothers me. But,
| returning to Chrome seems even worse. It's like a choice
| between 60% evil and (20% evil + 40% nuts).
|
| So I'm doing a trifecta. Chrome at work. A mix of Firefox and
| Brave at home... increasingly Brave, especially on mobile.
| wmanley wrote:
| > * Most users without hardware accelerated WebRender will now be
| using software WebRender.
|
| > * Improved software WebRender performance
|
| This sounds interesting. Does anyone know where I could read more
| about this?
| muizelaar wrote:
| We plan on writing up some more on Software WebRender some
| time, but some of the particular changes included in 90 are:
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1674396
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1700434
| ducktective wrote:
| > FTP support has been removed
|
| _sigh_
| Vixel wrote:
| Ahh FTP. The original "cloud storage".
| jszymborski wrote:
| It's my initial reaction too, but if I stop to think of Firefox
| as a huge, difficult-to-manage project where each feature costs
| dev resources and increases security risk, FTP support is
| probably _the_ feature I wouldn 't mind removed right next to
| the Pocket integration.
| sambe wrote:
| I don't think my estimate of the cost of FTP maintenance
| would be as high as yours. Why do you think FTP would still
| be such a cost at this stage?
| handrous wrote:
| On the one hand I'm OK with removing features to keep the
| browser slim. OTOH Firefox is _vastly_ fatter than it was in
| its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it
| doesn 't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual
| cause of complexity- and bloat-creep.
|
| [EDIT] I'd actually be a lot happier with this if FF were
| more aggressively adding new Internet or alternative-Web
| protocols, or trying to use their platform to give things
| like federated social networks more visibility and better
| prominence (via, say, optional but tastefully promoted
| integration with the browser). That might also, you know,
| differentiate them and give me a reason to recommend it to
| non-nerds again, despite "it's way, way faster than anything
| else, and lighter on resources, and blocks pop-ups and has
| tabs and doesn't have an ad banner!" no longer being enough
| (or even true, for some of those qualities) like it was in
| the early days.
| signal11 wrote:
| > OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early
| versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't
| seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause
| of complexity- and bloat-creep.
|
| I'm sure someone will correct me, but without looking at
| the source code, I suspect the following will have played a
| role in increasing code size since the earliest days of
| Phoenix:
|
| * support for newer media formats, from MP4 through AVIF
|
| * DRM maybe?
|
| * WebGL
|
| * SVG?
|
| * The complexity of modern CSS
| handrous wrote:
| Much, much bigger JS engine/sandbox, probably. Backwards
| compat with an ever-growing set of HTML, CSS, and JS. I'd
| guess a modern CSS engine is several times (dozens of
| times?) larger than what Phoenix shipped with. I expect
| their internal UI-drawing code/framework is a lot larger
| than in the Phoenix days. Webassembly. Canvas. And yeah,
| several of the other things you mentioned--video used to
| be the responsibility of plugins, for example.
|
| [EDIT] in fact, some things browsers do now were seen as
| _terrible_ ideas when Phoenix was released, because they
| would kill performance, since they 're so much more
| expensive than alternatives. Vector graphics were
| regarded as to-be-avoided for a long time, because
| they're so much more taxing on the client than raster.
| CSS doing animations would have been considered insane,
| fit only for "look how I can bring your machine to a
| crawl with a web page" demos. Maintaining an entire
| "shadow DOM" of Javascript objects would have been
| regarded as parody-levels of resource wasting for all but
| _very_ niche use-cases. No wonder the modern web is so
| slow and resource-hungry....
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Or Wasm, or WebRTC, or indexedDB ... plus anything else
| on that long list:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
| btgeekboy wrote:
| It's a terrible protocol not built for the modern internet.
| It's been a while since I've seen a URL containing "ftp" that
| isn't prefixed by http://
| ducktective wrote:
| Lots of university file dumps are served on FTP...
| marcodiego wrote:
| I used to add '+"index of"' when searching for files or
| dumps using google. It still works, but definitely not as
| good as a few years ago.
|
| A past time: typing '+"index of" main.dfm' to see what
| people were developing using delphi.
|
| '+"index of" dire straits sultans of swing mp3' still kind
| of works.
| jmrm wrote:
| I have tested and still works even with actual and a bit
| obscure software
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| With no HTTP alternative? Most FTP servers that I saw also
| had HTTP support.
| agumonkey wrote:
| and a lot more, it's a bit sad to lose ftp
| edgyquant wrote:
| Why not use an ftp client if you want to use ftp?
| acwan93 wrote:
| Don't know why this comment is being downvoted. I'd
| prefer to use another client like Transmit or Cyberduck.
| Having it all in one browser introduces complexity I
| don't think the team at Mozilla wants.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I'm actually ok with this. I'm happy to have it open those
| links in my dedicated tool just like it does with bittorrent
| links, etc.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| IMO browser should focus on HTTP/HTML support. There are plenty
| of protocols and there are plenty of programs with proper
| support for those protocols. I don't see nothing wrong with
| using transmission for torrents, WinSCP for FTP, etc.
| WillDaSilva wrote:
| I can see where you're coming from - having a browser support
| all these protocols seems like poor design. Let everything do
| what they're good at, and all that. But usability suffers
| when users need to install and open different applications
| for every protocol they want to use. I think it might be good
| if there was some robust way to provide low-level browser
| extensions (that would probably be loaded in as shared
| objects).
|
| That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP,
| bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the
| browser by installing the extensions through your package
| manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using
| bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on
| sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites,
| but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client.
|
| In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into
| the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not
| live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't
| be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for
| people to hand over low-level control of their browser would
| be problematic.
| coldpie wrote:
| I've just switched to using my file manager for FTP. Works
| fine.
| gbrown_ wrote:
| It was a convenience but one I can live without. Purely from a
| LOC view ripping out features from browsers is something I
| welcome.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Should become extensions then. That's why they were invented,
| no?
| _peeley wrote:
| Honestly, I'm more than happy to see older/niche protocols
| removed from web browsers. God knows the average browser
| contains way, _way_ too much stuff anyway[0], not to mention
| there are FTP clients that are likely far better for that use
| case than Firefox would ever be. I wouldn 't mind if FF (or
| other browsers) tightened their scope a little more often and
| adhered to the Unix philosophy a little more closely.
|
| 0: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-
| scope....
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Did you use it?
| ducktective wrote:
| Obviously not as much as HTTP(s) but still there are FTP
| links which show up after a google search from time to
| time...I guess now I have to context switch to the file
| explorer...Thunar is OK but does Windows Explorer even
| support FTP?
| brewdad wrote:
| The rare times I've needed FTP on Windows, I've found
| Cyberduck sufficient to do the job.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| If you don't mind an abysmal speed (due to small buffer
| size), then Windows Explorer can access FTP (but no
| FTPS).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Windows' File Explorer briefly flirted with WebDAV (and
| still sort of supports it for backward compatibility
| reasons, but using it is harder than ever for new things
| and the buggy WebDAV implementation is mostly frozen with
| its early oughts idea of WebDAV quirks). It never supported
| FTP, because it skipped FTP for WebDAV.
|
| Now that File Explorer has a 9p file server (from Plan 9)
| built in for WSL1/2 support, I wonder if you could hack
| together good Plan 9 style FTP support for File Explorer. I
| don't think the 9p server is that easy to talk to directly,
| though. (You could of course just do a Linux mount to FTP
| in WSL and maybe accomplish that through two step
| indirection, but I'd imagine doing something more directly
| in 9p would be preferable.)
| Avery3R wrote:
| I haven't tested up to more modern versions but explorer
| at least up to Vista had an ftp client built in, albeit
| not a very good one.
|
| Edit: Just tested on Win 10 1809, ftp support is still
| built-in to file explorer.
| [deleted]
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Personally, I've always just associated ftp:// with my
| preferred client and the browser just opens my client for
| me when I hit one. Works pretty good.
| scrollaway wrote:
| There are more mailto: links on the web than ftp: ones, and
| yet most browsers don't natively do email.
|
| Firefox didnt remove the protocol from existence. They just
| removed a feature nobody uses, which is better handled
| outside the browser.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I thought mailto links would open in webmail if
| configured?
| scrollaway wrote:
| You're getting my point. ftp links will open in an ftp
| client if configured.
| theden wrote:
| Have they mentioned the reason of its removal somewhere?
| hannob wrote:
| It's insecure by default, the TLS-enabled version has never
| been widely adopted, never been supported by browsers and has
| some horrible security problems of its own (see alpaca
| attack).
|
| Removing FTP thus fits into the strategy of browser to prefer
| HTTPS.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > Now, SmartBlock 2.0 in Firefox 90 eliminates this login
| problem. Initially, Facebook scripts are all blocked, just as
| before, ensuring your privacy is preserved. But when you click on
| the "Continue with Facebook" button to sign in, SmartBlock reacts
| by quickly unblocking the Facebook login script just in time for
| the sign-in to proceed smoothly.
|
| I wonder how it does that, and if it's open to exploitation by a
| malicious website like Facebook.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Am I reading this right? Firefox now implements special logic
| just for Facebook?
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| They have had a special logic AGAINST Facebook for a long
| time now, via Facebook containers
| gpvos wrote:
| That's a separate extension, with Facebook clearly in its
| name.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Uhm, there's about:compat, edge://compat/, WebKit Quirks (htt
| ps://trac.webkit.org/browser/webkit/trunk/Source/WebCore/...)
| , and Chrome (https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/s
| rc/+/main:con... and https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chr
| omium/src/+/main:com...).
| wisniewskit wrote:
| Funny enough, I also helped write the about:compat UI and
| work on the related site interventions.
|
| Site compatibility is a surprisingly broad topic that
| doesn't tend to fit neatly into our ideal vision of the
| web.
| opheliate wrote:
| If you're interested in special logic for specific websites,
| the WebKit Quirks.cpp [0] is well worth a look over.
|
| 0: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/
| pa...
| wisniewskit wrote:
| Yes, though in this case it's for sites relying on Facebook's
| login authenticator, not really Facebook itself.
|
| SmartBlock also contains special logic for Google Analytics,
| Google Publisher Tags, and other trackers that cause sites to
| break when blocked. It's not meant for their benefit, but the
| user's.
|
| In fact all browsers have special web-compatibility
| interventions for sites which don't work correctly in them.
| Even Chrome. And sometimes even for major sites and services,
| especially when it comes to anti-tracking features.
| simlevesque wrote:
| Maybe on mouse over or something like that.
| wnevets wrote:
| Could be related to the isTrusted[1] property to signify the
| event is caused by an user's action.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTru...
| wisniewskit wrote:
| Basically, if a site uses the Facebook SDK to start the
| authenticaion flow, it will be broken because it's blocked.
|
| SmartBlock just stands in for that blocked script, acting just
| enough like the real API to prevent some common site breakage.
|
| This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based
| authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real
| one, and continue the login flow.
|
| It only unblocks some Facebook resources, as listed here:
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensi...
|
| It only unblocks it for that specific website (the domain in
| the tab URL), and only until Firefox is closed. Other trackers
| continue to be blocked, and other tracking protections stay in
| place (as opposed to turning off ETP for the site entirely).
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based
| authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real
| one, and continue the login flow.
|
| I guess how it detects the "when sites try to open the popup-
| based authenticaion flow" is the attack vector. If it's
| Javascript, it's likely to be easily exploitable. If it's in
| the browser's chrome I suppose it would take a malicious add-
| on or similar device.
| wisniewskit wrote:
| Lead dev here. Yes, this is a give-and-take that probably
| will never be "perfect" for everyone.
|
| Right now a site could disingenuously call the relevant
| Facebook SDK API to unblock the Facebook resources listed
| here, and only on that site: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
| central/source/browser/extensi...
|
| I'm not too sure why that would be worthwhile as an attack,
| though. If you have anything in mind that would make it so,
| please let me know.
|
| In the meantime, I'm working on a way to further tighten
| this a bit so the unblocking will only happen if a popup is
| successfully opened (so that at least if the popup blocker
| kicks in, nothing will happen unless the user intentionally
| allows that popup). I'm not 100% sure if that will work
| well, but I hope so.
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