Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Another article on this: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/firefox-now-automatically-..., deduped from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432362.
While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.
Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.
#eobc_1,.r-i4KASL__ToPM,.r-iGs8q6iiSUas{ display:none !important; }
I think it was something like "other people also search for..." thing which poped up unexepectedly.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...
This catches me out regularly. I would not be surprised if a team at Google implemented this and immediately saw “increased engagement” from users in an AB test, so they locked it in permanently and considered it case closed, the science is in.
Scientism at its worst.
Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening
I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...
How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results. Even though I disabled Cortana. Incredible.
Microsoft is actually uncoupling Cortana to Windows Search/Start Menu in the next major release, so this should be less of a problem.
My Windows 10 start menu lags. Press windows key or click on it, no response for a good ten seconds or more.
I have this on my work machine, a previous install, my home machine, a Surface Book, a remote desktop server on Windows 2016.
And yet, I've never seen anyone else talking about it. I can't believe I'm the only one who has this "my start menu has paged out to 5400rpm disk, then powered the disk down" experience.
I have too many computers at home, some verrry slow ones, and they all pop up the start menu within a second or two unless I've just booted the PC.
I work with a lot of people who use Windows 10 all day long, and I've never heard one of them ever complain about a slow start menu. Complaints about search results? Absolutely.
I suspect it's something you're installing, and I'm sure you'll deny that (and you very well could be right, I don't know) and these things are time consuming to diagnose, unfortunately.
A quick search yielded:
https://www.tenforums.com/performance-maintenance/12860-wind... https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3doydz/windows_1... https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/windows-10-start-men... https://bradshacks.com/fix-start-menu-lag/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-10-second-fix-for-sluggish...
Maybe not the norm, but we're not the only ones. It's obviously an issue that exists.
I often put the phone in my pocket after a call without pressing the sleep button, so the screen stays active, causing me to unknowingly "butt dial" random numbers, sometimes talking to other people while a confused/mischievous person on the call is listening in...
1) Arrow
2) Arboles
3) Area
And then type another 'r' before you realize your result is there ("Arr") and as you go to select "Arrow" the auto-suggest results turn into
1) Array
2) Arrogant
3) Arrow
Like, how does adding the second 'r' make "Array" higher probability than "Arrow"?!
Once an item matches the search, it should stay in place unless it’s invalidated by further typing. Reshuffling just adds needless friction.
When you search you don't type letter by letter and inspect the suggestions after each keystroke. You type many letters and only then you inspect the suggestions/results.
Also it seems to use a very slow random number generator because it always takes a long time to populate the random list.
So stupid.
Makes me wish there was some sort of an understanding that: The thing I just clicked was somewhere else within the last 400ms, so click on what used to be there."
Just as planned
Of course, if you did discover the true reason for the increase in your click rates, you'd probably stay quiet about it. So maybe it's a bit of both.
That site that you're about to reload because it isn't doing anything? Suddenly loads just as your finger is depressing the mouse button to reload. That JavaScript heavy site that has brought your pc to its knees? Works just as you've elected to kill the process.
I assume its a variant of Sods Law.
I dont think thats coincidence. More likely, the browser already has downloaded the page itself but is waiting for some resource before rendering it. If you reload, it renders what it has immediately.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...
They are racking up click-throughs.
Advertisers pay just as much for accidental clicks as intentional ones, so the site operator is incentivized to generate as many as possible. Being the dumbest morons ever to mo a ron, the advertisers don't understand that they're the marks in this particular con game.
Eventually they will get tired of paying for worthless clicks, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
They'll just start paying less per click. A worse outcome for everyone, not just the bad players.
If we could get this feature on mobile and desktop operating systems, I would be soo happy. I probably click/tap on something just before it moves about fifty times a day. Having the fastest devices only helps a little.
This has been my #1 gripe with web sites since pretty much the dawn of time. Finally!
JavaScript is not “unavoidable,” it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.
The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.
Super, super annoying!
I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard.
That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.
Eg setting an image to be "width: 100vw; height: 100vh;" means it'll be squished to fill the user's viewport. "width: 100vw; height: auto;" will fill the viewport horizontally and scale the image vertically as per it's aspect ratio. And so on. Generally that'll look bad though because browsers scale things fast rather than well.
And then there's the options for background images. "background-size: cover" is quite useful.
CSS is fun.
``` object-fit: cover ```
comes to mind as a client-side solution I used in the past for this problem
Generally, I'd agree that authoring time is some 9X% solution, though there remain edge cases.
I can't think of a good use case for auto generating arbitrarily large images, and as a user I wouldn't want to visit websites where the web designer thinks that's a good idea either.
What thos cases are is ... a good question, and my point is more thaat this can be done than to say why or that it's a good idea.
Upshot again is that image size need not be deterministic at authoring time.
<img width="100" height="100" style="width:100%;height:auto;" src=test.png>
width: 2000px;
max-width: 100%;
ratio: 16/9;
Edit to add: Or maybe it would be better to just have the ability to lock the ratio, such as:
ratio: fixed; .DamnInteresting {
position: relative;
display: block;
}
.DamnInteresting::before {
content: '';
display: block;
/* 16:9 shim! */
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
}
.DamnInteresting img {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
}
(The ::before element isn't stricly necessary; the padding can go on the .DamnInteresting element directly - just make sure .DamnInteresting is wrapped in a containing element of your desired width and you can even use inline styles for the padding shim.)
(Edit: a word)
This theme is discussed here often, but really, this is what HTML was designed for. Load https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ in a browser and scale it at will, it will always look good. The fact that people put a ton of often useless stuff and complain it looks bad in some browser doesn't mean media queries are theonly way.
That's a benefit, in my view.
I believe opera 12 could do this?
> he problem is that the software stack makes tons of round-trip requests
Latency matters because of all of those round-trip requests. Each individual request incurs at least 2x the network latency value (one network latency trip out to the server, another network latency trip back). If browsers did not try to run parallel requests, then all those round trips would sum up to a substantial overall delay.
Well then, since it's a physical impossibility to do away with them, we'd better start working on improving the speed of light.
That describes zero browsers. And "it's not loading parallel enough" is very much a software stack problem and not a network problem.
We could shove full pages over the wire in 200ms if we tried harder.
From the post you replied to:
> Software is actively working to overcome the limitations of latency, such as with HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and TLS 1.3.
The whole point is to eliminate those round-trips, and just stream content to the browser at the limit of its available bandwidth.
The problem is mainly with ads, when 1) there may or may not be an ad available, and 2) you're allowing the ad height to be dynamic, to allow for greater possible inventory.
The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit tab, and then type in a search query.
It's nice, clean, simple and nowhere near as "bloaty" (for lack of a better word) as normal FF on android. I use it as my default browser on my phone, but (for some reason[1]) every now and again it dumps articles I leave open and then I am no longer able to find and read them :/
[1] I have a feeling it happens after every update.
The most underrated and undermarketed to the average user Firefox feature.
In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs.
It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users....
On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life.
I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug.
Porn browsing, meanwhile, is much better done with a secondary dedicated Chrome profile.
I would recommend actually using it, though—with a dedicated porn-browsing Google Account, that you created once upon a time in an internet cafe, using Mailinator or the like as the recovery email. After all, nothing gets people to keep digging more than a layer of anonymity; and nothing gets people to stop digging more than finding what seems to be a real person who "uses" a bunch of services like Google, Facebook, etc. all with the same email.
I use little snitch on mac, and I still continue to get Firefox connect dialogs for private tabs long after they were closed.
Safari on mac does not exhibit that behavior.
That said now that I know banks have google analytics in them, I really wonder whether I'm better off trusting the extensions.......
This will be a big help for me. Makes me wonder how many more there are that are just too cumbersome to discover.
TL;DR:
Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged.
Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
Add # to search for matches in page titles.
Add $ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
Add ? to search for matches in suggestions.
I use the first 3, they compound too (in a slightly strange way, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire..., see last few paras.).
It's important that you type them AFTER the thing to search for, not before.
For example, `mytag +` instead of `+ mytag`.
I found that quite surprising.
I think that Google sites must not be thoroughly tested on firefox though! Vanilla Gmail (no add-ons or theme, but not the basic HTML version) isn't too fast. Not as fast as it used to be a year ago on Chrome either, but not as bad as FF.
It's always been a little surprising that this isn't grounds for a huge fine, but apparently they get away with it by saying something vague and corporate like "we can't be sure this works".
I'll add the caveat that I typically restart my browser at least once a day, perhaps avoids the problem.
Later it stopped to crash, but acted weirdly (clicks on links didn't work, etc).
Nowadays we have the notice to restart the browser. It didn't arrive years ago, just a few releases ago.
This was only under Linux, and only with the distro package managers. Under Windows or MacOS, the updater updates the browser on next restart, so this didn't happen.
1. Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? I dunno, I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update. 2. Firefox has a pretty reliable "Restore Previous Session" feature that works well. I have also been known to throw a SIGTERM at Firefox and just let it prompt me when I start it again for the "Something went wrong, should we restore your session?". Seems to always work for me.
Restore session doesn't help if you're in a private session.
Also you may be in the middle of actually using your browser for thing that you don't want to interrupt, a game, an online application, anything really..
Don't do automatic updates if you do not want automatic updates. Automatic updates just absolutely can cause you to have to restart stuff, depending on what got updated exactly.
Updates are automatic every day.
>I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update
How often does that happen? It doesn't seem reasonable to put off security updates that have already been fixed and are simply waiting to install.
Firefox is the only program I've run into where automatic updates have led to a negative experience. Every single other program handles them just fine.
I haven't rebooted my system in days, and I make updates twice a day...
Quite inconvenient.
My browser is open when my computer is running. I do updates at random times through-out the day, for example before installing new packages. Having to close my browser leads to dead sessions and text being lost from input fields and whatever other state there might be.
My guess is that this is some per-tab isolation/process stuff that would result in a mismatch between tabs from before the update and tabs after the update.
On MacOS or Windows (maybe even Linux with the Mozilla updater, never tried it), the updater does the update on the next restart.
Chrome on macOS and Windows keeps itself up to date; for whatever reason Chrome on Linux installs a google.chrome repository, uses the distro package manager, and clobbers the running binary. shrug
Because that's the proper way to do things instead of each application bypassing the package manager and downloading updates and whatever else behind your back. How would you track and control updates if each application you use decided to do its own thing? Secondly, if installed to system directories, applications cannot write there without superuser privileges.
This is not a problem on Unix-like systems, actually. Any running process, that has some file open, will keep the original file open, even if the filename points to another file now. Only processes that open the file after the change will get the new version.
I suspect that the protocol that multiple processes of Firefox used to communicate together could change between version and the mismatch between old and newly launched processes caused the problem. So it is versioned now, and if the versions are mismatched, warning is being shown.
> for whatever reason Chrome on Linux installs a google.chrome repository, uses the distro package manager, and clobbers the running binary
As others have said, it is actually the right approach. The custom updaters for Firefox and Chrome under Windows and MacOS are there, because they are lacking any system for centralized package management.
Flatpak solves this in a third way: it doesn't clobber the current tree, it creates a new, separate one and signals the application, that it was updated, and can restart into a new version, when it is convenient. It gets the best of the custom windows/mac updaters (not overwriting running apps), together with the best of linux package managers (centralized management).
They removed the "never check for updates" option and nag nag nag to update.
I unintentionally updated multiple times when the nag menu conveniently appeared while I was pressing the keyboard.
The last accident made me firewall Firefox's update program.
Snap and Flatpak apps I think can do this as well, because they aren't stepping on the running binaries during the update. And you get the updated version when you relaunch.
Firefox isn't special in this regard. 100% of my applications on Windows and macOS expect to be quit before they can be updated, and is enforced either by the application, the OS, or the updater. I suspect that distro package managers don't really have a way to do an out of band update, all they can do is step all over in-use libraries and that inevitably causes the application to go a little crazy.
If you've updated your installation, the new renderer will be the new version, but the parent (ui) process is still the old version. The protocol the two use to talk to each other is not fixed, and messages will start looking malformed. Malformed messages are handled by immediately terminating the process, because otherwise security guarantees go out the window.
So the upshot was that you'd get various crashes in the "I updated Firefox and then kept using it" situation. I've run into a bunch personally, and there is _lots_ of crash reporting data on this. The crashes are not OS-specific; they just have to do with whether changes happened to the IPC protocol.
A "proper" solution would be for the parent process to not use the on-disk version of the renderer to launch new renderers. There's work ongoing to make that possible, but in the meantime the crash volume due to this problem was high enough that the mitigation you see was put in place.
This package currently ships no functionality, but may be used again in
the future to display a restart notification after upgrading Firefox.A few seconds later, the video fades in and the episode starts playing! I didn't even notice it and kind of started watching the episode, but then realized that I hadn't actually started it myself!
Netflix almost roped me into watching an episode even though I didn't explicitly ask them to, and that seems very manipulative to me.
They must know by now how many people hate this, but they refuse to let users disable it. If you CC their general counsel and point out that it raises access barriers for users with attention or anxiety disorders, they might actually do something.
Two clicks and he's watching the same episode at 4K on any platform he well likes, with no spyware running on his machine.
I just gave up on Netflix because of this, but not because I actually use a "VPN." It's because my ISP doesn't provide native IPv6 support so I use a tunnel from Hurricane Electric's TunnelBroker service. A couple of years ago, Netflix published AAAA records in DNS and decided that HE's IPv6 service is a "VPN" so they block it.
I made do with forwarding *.netflix.com in my usual DNS server to another DNS server configured to not return any AAAA records but that only works about 80% of the time now and I've had to do even more drastic things (like forcing a DNAT rule for anything heading out on port 53 to be rewritten to my own DNS server to avoid the apps getting "clever" and just querying whomever they like in spite of my DHCP server's config) to the point that I gave up. Hulu and iTunes don't give me crap so I just use them.
If its not there I'll pirate without hesitation. The only inconvenience is the time it takes to drag my laptop to the HDMI cable on the TV.
I use it on occasion instead of doing the 2 minute search dance.
Or perhaps management already knows and deliberately makes these decisions based on internal metrics and HN folks are essentially a non-existent blip on their radar...
EDIT: I also regularly leave feedback using the ? button (only available in Watch mode) but it seems to go unread. I don't even get an email "we take your feedback seriously and will look into this" which other sites tend to provide.
I'm sure they are. And as long as Netflix posts above-estimated profits and/or revenues, it doesn't matter one wit. (whit?)
1. It struck me at some point that Netflix UI is carefully designed to hide the fact on how little content they really have now. If you go into different genres at times there are barely 40-50 things you can watch (sometimes much lesser). They have lost a ton of items from their catalog (A queue I had which had ~85 items has dropped to 3 items without me removing anything because of shows / movies being removed). If you think of content that in the past would be > 4 stars, you will see most categories have <5 titles that fall under this criteria.
2. Netflix UI is now optimized only for surfacing the 3-4 new shows they launched this month.
3. The autoplay feature (with an impossibly short hover timeout ) appears to be an output of a quantitative metric based engagement maximization process. I suspect they have some charts internally which measure engagement and this specific design hits some local optimum there.
4. Lastly, as a world cinema movie buff I do not think I am the audience anymore. The long tail of delightful movies from across the world is long gone.
I wish them well, they were immensely educational when I first moved to the US. Growing up in India I never had the means to see cinema from across the world, so a service that would allow me to go through various best movies lists and see them two movies a week at a time was magical.
> Improved performance and reduced crash rates by [doubling web content loading processes from 4 to 8 [1]
From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency. I think there's supposed to be a link to more explanation or the relevant ticket, but it looks like they forgot to actually add the link. Can somebody fill it in here?
At the end of the day, you're still aiming to load, in FF 66, just as many tabs as in FF pre-66. FF's total memory usage should be about the same whether you're using 4 processes or 8. Sure, if each FF process now takes care of fewer tabs, then when OOM does happen, the FF processes have a lower OOM score and are less likely to get killed. But something will get killed regardless, just maybe not FF. That's like trying to avoid punishment after a prison brawl by keeping your head low: someone will get punished regardless, just maybe not you.
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrashers/?product=Firefox...
It makes sense then.
In practice some of that is reserved for the kernel, so you get less for use by the process itself. Historically 2GB on Windows, though there were some non-default compilation/linking options you could set to get 3GB.
A 32-bit process running on a 64-bit kernel can get 4GB of address space.
And yes, lots of computers have >4GB physical RAM, even if you don't count swap/page files.
For those users, the memory a process can use is capped at 2-4GB (depending on whether the OS itself is 32-bit or 64-bit and a few other things).
The most common OOM crashes on Windows are running out of virtual address space, not running out of actual physical RAM.
In that context, having more processes in fact gives you more address space and reduces the chance that you will run out.
While that post addresses the reason why we can double the number of processes, I think I'm still missing the reason why we should double the number of processes (aside from performance reasons).
I mean, the release notes made it sound like more processes is more stable than fewer processes (unless I'm misreading it). How does doubling the number of processes result in fewer crashes? If we manually force FF 66 to use 4 processes only, would it result in more crashes than using 8 processes?
Mozilla/Firefox is writing more stuff in Rust, where concurrency is easier to do right. I'm not sure how much that effort has improved the reliability so far but it's happening:
This is also why we can't have nice things by the way.
Sure, almost everything mentioned in the article is problematic. Then again, maybe it's just us programmed to hit Ctrl-T too much over a decade...
I just open new tabs whenever I think something might be worth reading, but only have time every now and then to actually read part of the stack.
Navigation (forward/back), history, tabs, bookmarks et all are all trying to do various forms of the same thing, and their overall relationship to each other is fundamentally broken, because each individual component is too rigidly defined and isolated.
I should be able to click between a couple buttons to see how tabs are 1) related to each other from a time/clicked/navigation history perspective 2) workspace perspective 3) topic perspective
Firefox had some experiment that merged a visual history with tabs, I didnt like the idea at all, but at least they were thinking about change.
I've come to the conclusion that the bottom line is that I don't need more than a few tabs open, and that if I do, my attention is probably too fractured.
Solution is to change my habits and be a little bit more deliberate with how I'm using the browser.
This kind of thing is why I leave tabs up.
I would definitely love to see more experimentation around this area.
[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/07/24/chrome-experimentin...
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simpleundoclose/em...
I have no idea what to do with them. Even something as simple as "read them" is .. and then what, close and forget them?
No idea what I even want to achieve - integrate them into my life in some hoarder kind of "this will make me a better, more knowledgeable person" way?
The closed tabs are saved in a searchable list so if something actually important gets closed you can find it again, but I find that 99% of the time I don't even notice that it has auto-closed hundreds of tabs I've opened over the course of the day.
I think I used to tell myself that leaving tabs open was sort of a 'soft bookmark', but now I just bookmark stuff that I genuinely want to come back to, and let the rest of the unimportant stuff I stumble across just disappear.
Let the war begin!!
Unfortunately, during the transition to quantum and WebExtensions the developers blocked add-ons making changes to the Firefox interface, which crippled TMP and a variety of other add-ons. To suddenly have your favorite add-on crippled is a little painful but what made me walk away was the tone of responses from Mozilla people on the boards and the bug reports. It ranged from dismissive, to arrogant, to angry which, particularly given how quickly the transition took place, just added insult to injury.
It seemed like Mozilla did get the message by the end of 2017 that their approach and response to add-ons had alienated many users. One of their 2018 visions included a statement that 'In 2018, extensions will be one of the reasons why people choose and use Firefox.' Unfortunately, when I looked at the TMP message boards last year I still saw very little in the way of signs of cooperation and encouragement from Mozilla. The TMP developer, onemen, still seems to be trying his best to produce a suite of extensions to reproduce the lost functionality and to be fair to Mozilla they have been moving obstacles out of the way but the pace is glacial.
Chrome may be creepy and invasive but right now it's far more flexible and remains a smoother experience. I'd really love to switch away from Chrome but I won't trade it for an inflexible Firefox UI. If Mozilla could loosen up on the UI restrictions, demonstrate that they're doing everything possible to make the product friendly for add-on developers, and somehow get themselves around to replicating, or helping to replicate, TMP and other crippled add-ons then I would enthusiastically consider switching.
Toolbar:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215064
Session managers:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474130
It shouldn't take three plus years to fix an upgrade. The goal was good, WebExtensions are a significant step forward as a concept. Planning, execution and post-transition management sucked.
The real failure was that WebExtensions should have been started several years earlier, but for various reasons that can was kicked down the road. That is an interesting untold story.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smoothscroll/nbokb...
The other browsers are probably mostly tested with Apple's high precision mouse/trackpad devices that report scroll distance in very small steps instead of the coarse distance reporting of standard mice.
The second issue, what you are probably referring to is how the page is animated between those two points. Firefox now uses something old Opera used to have, a really gradual scroll. All chromium-based browser I just tried have this rather jumpy scroll. It's different, but it is not nearly as bad as it used to be in FF.
In short, I don't know, but "smooth scrolling" is something you might want to search for.
Until recently Firefox's URL bar had a THICK blue glow when it was in focus, instead of the more subtle one the rest of Mac OS has. It infuriated me. They didn't fix it for years. Why? Because nobody noticed it or cared enough, I guess.
"They didn't fix it" implies someone reported it as a bug. Even if no one did, if you were infuriated by it, surely you did, right?
Chrome and Safari support keyboard multimedia keys to play/pause video and audio which firefox does not. Picture in Picture is not available on Firefox.
Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.
https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html mentions about excessive power consumption on webrender.
I find this hugely annoying as well on MacOS when using the touchpad. This is also the reason why I stick to iOS instead of going for Android. All of these details are great on my laptop and phone, though they're not what I really need on my desktop.
This was actually one of my major annoyances, since I use this feature often. I'm glad they added it, chances are others use it too.
It's occurred to me that I should find out how to make a placebo button and put there, but I haven't prioritized it.
What's funny is that if escape was a real button I would probably really like the touchbar!
Apologies for the mistake.
Works on Chrome as I found out today.
I really don't understand the priorities of the Mozilla/Firefox project.
Yes, there are bugs filed on the other keyboard issues -- some more than 10 year old, e.g., 433966 or 429043. I could probably fix them myself, with enough effort, but Mozilla has the weirdest architecture so all my Mac programming knowledge won't help much. The last time I filed a minor bug against Firefox (context menus appear in the wrong place by a couple pixels), it was tagged "[good first bug]" -- and it ended up taking some poor soul 7 months and 790 lines to fix, and I still don't think it's correct.
I think it's time for someone to out-Firefox Firefox. The free and open nature is great, but the UI is collapsing under its own weight.
I believe this isn’t enabled for KDE Plasma.
If you like a separate title bar like the old version of Firefox, then use the hamburger menu, choose “customise” and check the box for the title bar.
Someone knows if it's customizable in the config menu, searching the obvious "titlebar" reports only two not useful entries?
Anyway thanks.
Edit: in Chrome/Chromium works as I expected, I think I should file a bug then.
I haven't used gnome in quite a while, so I'm not totally certain of what was before this change, but I wouldn't consider it problematic. I find that saving the extra 20 pixels at the top is good for the widescreen aspect ratio of most monitors.
Could be that Ubuntu were already doing this and it has now made it upstream, I suppose.
UPDATE: Yes it does, but it's not enabled by default. (?)
I went over the subject here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332
"I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me"
Funny, I'd place the golden age before all these things you cite.
Out of curiosity what's your favourite website, what most sums up your golden age?
I'm thinking of golden age in terms of the power available to webpages/browsers. This would be when HTML5/webgl/etc features had just gotten implemented, plugins like Flash and Java were still supported, and Firefox used the old extension system. All of the old web was still there alongside the cool new stuff. Now the old stuff is gone and the new stuff is getting ruined.
Would you want a reddit where every embedded video in a thread auto played though?
I'm guessing our disagreement is over who has final say over display of content? I would say the client, you would say the server (or creator)? Is that fair?
On the subject of Reddit I do find it unnecessarily burdensome that I have to give Reddit Enhancement Suite permission for every individual domain that it wants to embed stuff from, another place where I feel like browsers went too far locking themselves down.
The problem with blacklists is that they default to letting bad things through if not maintained. But yeah it would be nice to think that we still have a web where the blacklist would be less unwieldy than the whitelist.
But web is also a tool (and a necessary one for many jobs). And advertisers have abused web to such degree, that there had to be a push back.
As far as white listing vs black listing goes, white listing is always better option. Especially for things like this, because i know that i don't want ads/videos/sound from 99% of websites I visit.
Firefox has the functionality, now it needs to cement its narrative.
https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1185996 https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1185347
It's infuriating that a page can dictate what gets placed in my clipboard against my will.
I had to tweak my Firefox quite a lot to pass that "benchmark".
No and Yes.
No, theoretically there could be spectre vulns. Practically we have seen zero spectre-based attacks in the wild. It's not a big deal.
The ongoing Fission work is basically defense in depth against future potential Spectre-like vulnerabilities.
- Firefox -
https://www.howtogeek.com/326532/safari-now-disables-auto-pl...
I wonder whether there's a way around that, but I don't see it.
So some responsible users are affected by this change, but it is also a necessary change due to too many abusers. This is why we cannot have nice things.
I was thinking something like a browser could allow audio in response to, say, a push notification (akin to how they allow popups to be created after user click events) but that'd be easily gameable for the situation you describe. There's no way a browser can distinguish between a legitimate message from a human and robospam.
Thanks for the clarification.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...
Options -> Privacy & Security -> Block Websites from automatically playing sound -> Exceptions (Allow/Block)
How well does this work in practice?
In the uBlock Origin settings you can go to the 'Filter lists' tab and enable more filter lists, including ones that delete cookie popups.
Here are a few good ones:
Built In => uBlock filters - I have enabled all except experimental
Ads => Adblock Warning Removal List (messages asking you to disable adblocker)
Annoyances => Fanboy's Cookie, Annoyance, and Social Blocking Lists (social blocking deletes like/share buttons)
very good, thanks for the hard work!
I hoped it was fixed in the release but seems to be not the case.
If disabling CoreLocation fixes the problem, you might look in macOS System Preferences for location permissions. The first time an application tries to use the local location service, macOS prompts the user to grant permission to the application. If you accidentally click "deny", then macOS will automatically deny all future Firefox location requests.
I don't care about the video, because any hostile website could still generate video by using gifs, or by playing a sequence of image frames using JavaScript.
Autoplaying video is not acceptable.
My personal preference would have been to mute tabs by default rather than blocking autoplay:
- Sites can't detect a muted tab with JS, so they can't use it for tracking or block services behind it.
- Nothing would break. Firefox did a pretty good job of minimizing the potential breakage from this change, but there are still edge cases and some weird logic that's required to address them. A muted tab is no different than you unplugging the speakers from your computer. It'll never cause a Javascript error.
- It's simpler from a user perspective. You can already mute a tab. Why do we need another control that's meant to fulfill the same purpose?
The counter-argument is that blocking autoplay is actually about saving data, but in reality:
- The restrictions are trivial to bypass, since you can just start playing after the first user gesture/action.
- Muted videos are still allowed to autoplay.
So if you're trying to save data, it would still be a lot better to just have an option to block audio/video entirely, not just of the autoplaying variety.
As far as I can tell, Mozilla basically got kind of railroaded into this implementation because that's what Google did, and that set the general narrative. Mozilla ended up with a better implementation than Google, but this is still one of those restrictions where I feel like 2-3 years from now we're going to look back and say, "yeah, this wasn't really thought through all the way."
If the objective is to stop autoplaying sound, why solve a more general problem rather than solve the actual problem?
Been using Firefox nightly on Android and it's on par with chrome (even faster with ublock running since FF can run extensions on mobile), but the battery drain feels higher than with chrome.
"Fixed: <button> element is no longer special cased in event dispatch, per latest specifications"
I'm opening a lot of windows because I'm not a fan of tabs. So Firefox feels extremely sluggish to me even though the actual rendering and JavaScript execution is anything but sluggish.
I'm not even sure if Firefox windows open so slowly for a reason or if it's just a really badly designed animation.
Chrome simply broke a lot of content on the Web, while Firefox just mutes it and lets you unmute.
They added this to my home page, despite the fact that my default search provider is DDG.
Mozilla, could you STOP bundling advertisements into my browser?
I would like one prominent check box in the settings that says, "Never, ever auto-play videos. Ever."
I cannot imagine thinking, "You know what this site needs? A video that starts playing by itself!"
Actually it's also time to ban JavaScript after horrendous front end frameworks made simple page loads slow, energy and time consuming.
Javascript is useful, it is just a shame most people dont use it for good.
I have at least 5 progressive webapps open right now, none of which could work without javascript. Of the other 20 websites I have open in other tabs, none are being annoying or aggressive, and I'm not even using an adblocker.
If it was just as easy to write and distribute native applications, we'd be doing that, instead of bolting it onto the web. But it's pretty clearly not.
I will bet you that in 99% of alternative timelines, we'd end up with something incredibly similar to what we've got today, and you'd still be complaining that applications aren't "native" enough, because practically nobody cares that a taskbar or button isn't a native OS component. They care that their application works, and can be quickly deployed and updated.
Browsers not supporting nonsense like Javascript.
(I'm going to ignore the use of "proper application" instead of "native (non-web) application"; it isn't helping your argument.)
Native applications can choose whether they follow UI conventions or not; many games don't, for instance. Web applications have the same choice; they can use native controls provided by the browser, and I certainly agree that well-behaved web applications should if they don't have a good reason to do otherwise (e.g. use standard form controls for native look-and-feel and better integration/interaction).
> they appear in the task bar
So do progressive web apps (PWAs).
> are launched from the application launcher
PWAs are as well. (Likewise for many other aspects of integration with the rest of the system.)
> Proper applications can also be sandboxed
But there aren't yet standard mechanisms for that (outside of mobile platforms), and you can't necessarily trust that an application will sandbox itself. Current sandbox mechanisms mostly get used by applications to protect against exploits, not for users to protect themselves against applications.
macOS certainly has one.
There's another alternative, which is curated and audited app stores à la iOS, but the fact that you can't use applications unless they're approved by a megacorporation would also be bad for people's computing autonomy.
(Also, what makes you think that the developers of bloated JS apps won't make bloated desktop apps?)
> (Also, what makes you think that the developers of bloated JS apps won't make bloated desktop apps?)
Nothing. Its possible to create garbage desktop apps. But its impossible to create non-garbage web apps.
Please expand on this claim. What is a "pseudo-application" and what is a "document viewer"? In particular, how does having an app runtime outside a "document viewer" accomplish the goals you would like to see?
> Its possible to create garbage desktop apps. But its impossible to create non-garbage web apps.
Please expand on this claim. I've seen tons of non-garbage web apps.
Presumably, a webpage in a browser.
> In particular, how does having an app runtime outside a "document viewer" accomplish the goals you would like to see?
> I've seen tons of non-garbage web apps.
Good web software can't compete with good native software in things like performance and platform features, so this is my guess as to what is considered to be non-"garbage".
For example, url sharing / deep linking goes out the window. I can't share what I'm looking at in macOS' Maps.app like I can on the Google Maps website, pure downgrade.
I also don't want to download an application for everything. Very few things deserve a permanent spot on my computer. I have much less control over desktop apps than I do a website.
Or look at macOS' News.app. Another downgrade from reading news in a browser tab. It has no tabs. There's no right-click. It implemented its own back button. It only supports the few news sources that come preinstalled on it. I can't add my own. Why would I prefer this?
Obviously native applications have their place, but let's not suggest there aren't trade-offs.
What's odd about your posts is that you suggest it's an inconvenience that you might have to disable Javascript. Maybe you have to use NoScript or uMatrix or uBlock. But at least you have the option and this sort of control over the web browser. If a native application does something that you don't like, you have basically zero recourse beyond uninstalling it or begging the developer to change something you could've done in the browser with a quick browser extension or CSS tweak.
Yes, thats the one good thing about the web. But there is no reason proper applications cannot support this.
> Or look at macOS' News.app.
Im not familiar with that app but I guess its some sort of reader for hypertext documents (published by news organizations)? The one thing a browser is good at?
But you can? For example, https://maps.apple.com/?ll=36.103117,-103.901438&spn=0.00098...
> Or look at macOS' News.app. Another downgrade from reading news in a browser tab. It has no tabs. There's no right-click. It implemented its own back button. It only supports the few news sources that come preinstalled on it. I can't add my own. Why would I prefer this?
You shouldn't; you should be annoyed that Apple shipped this and demand that they give you better.
Now try this: https://goo.gl/maps/dvhDpd93gJs
Installing apps is really not aomething i want. I am trying to keep apps on my phone low for a reason, browser is actually perfect for most of what i do.
Word processors? Only if you're requiring something like Markdown.
Video chat seems right out, unless you're permitting a Flash solution, which would be severely cheating.
I can use web apps on any platform without waiting for the company to do it.
I refuse to install apps on my devices.
Yes! You dont have to update if you dont want to. Thats a feature. Of course, the rise of proprietary APIs over interoperable protocols has lessened that advantage.
Is better performance and more features not an improvement to you?
What most people dont realize is web apps are a boon to linux people. Most companies would not develop for linux at all.
Support for most platform APIs?
> I prefer companies spend their resources on improving the product instead of implementing same thing thrice.
Funny, this is exactly my issue with web apps. I don't want to use software where the engineers have done a poor job reimplementing things the system provides for free.
You havent heard of LibreOffice?
Theres Ted if you cant stretch to libreoffice though. https://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/
'offline' apps, 'local' cloud. Its the future!
That's not to say I disagree though. The tech world is very good at creating monopolies.
Don't be disingenuous. The thread's about Firefox and JavaScript. It's quite clear @tehlike wasn't talking about native desktop apps, but web apps.
Well, technically it's possible, and even some parts of the script could be allowed to run or not.
> a browser cannot distinguish it from the good
But the user can. And the machine could help, thanks to machine learning.
How? I don't think that users even agree what consists of "good" and "bad" JavaScript.
For the more advanced things, like identifying the part of Javascript code that brings e.g. 'the fancy eating 40% of the CPU scrollbar' user want to disable, some automation is needed.
I have to do it that way because it's very difficult to determine which scripts are bad and which aren't without actually reviewing the JS itself. In my view, "bad" usually means that the script is phoning home in some way.
Is this good Javascript? I dont think so. Does disabling it on an individual level help? No.
I built my last webapp entirely without JavaScript. Users constantly praise how fast it is. There's no bugs with the back button. It's accessible out-of-the-box. Form inputs work correctly out-of-the-box. It's clear when data is being loaded/submitted and when it's not (since that's already built into the browser). And on and on and on...
JavaScript is the worst thing to happen to UX, privacy, speed, caching, and accessibility. So much of the web's UX is broken because of JS. It's depressing because it was all unnecessary. We went from a standard declarative interface shared by all websites to an "anything goes" black box runtime.
Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is left but plain text and ads, to thunderous applause. Gross overreaction after gross overreaction and now we're in a state where extensions are a shallow husk of their former glory, you need to jump through legally vague ridiculous hoops to do anything involving user data, a vast trove of great Flash content is no longer accessible to the average user, web apps with sound and video aren't allowed to work seamlessly without an obnoxious "click here to let the webpage do what it should be able to do anyway" button, and various other unnecessary restrictions. How soon until it's the default that you need to give a website permission to display images and you need a license to make a webpage? That's the direction it feels like we're heading in. I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me, but at least I was alive for it.
I went over the subject here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332
It is a much more persuasive argument that the new controls are simply a reaction to bad actors who corrupted the value the original web provided. Sure, when the internet was a smaller village, nobody needed to lock their door: but then the village turned into the city, and locks became necessary. It seems strange to blame the locks for the reason they are needed.
I know you're being facetious, but I liked the internet so much better when I used to browse with images off by default. It could be that I was an optimistic 14 year old, or even simple nostalgia, but the internet felt like a cool friendly place back then.
Chrome is moving more and more towards controling their browser experience, and monetizing their existing web properties (example, there are now ads in the Gmail iOS App)
Apple is focusing more and more on privacy, especially for Safari.This is the best way that can fight back against Google's market share. They've definitely done their market research, so Firefox doing the same is probably in step with market needs.
I think longer term this is going to pay off big for Firefox
(Perhaps there are users of Pale Moon or other pre-Quantum forks?)
Chrome doesn't have super huge list of new features either.
Anyway, here's the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history#Releas...