14 ms·

Firefox 59 released

394 points by dikiaap 9y ago

syeaj 9y ago
I switched to Firefox from Chrome at 58. I've been very happy with the experience all around. Keep up the good work, Mozilla!
- trevor-e 9y ago
  I too switched for several months, but am already back to using Chrome. Even with the performance improvements, it's still noticeably slower than Chrome.
  - syeaj 9y ago
    I'm curious: what OS do you use and what sites are you visiting? I've had a stellar experience on Arch Linux. The RAM usage is down. I can't say I really ever found Chrome slow, but nor is Firefox for me. I think they're both plenty fast, but I prefer sites without lots of garbage flying around on the page anyway.
    - trevor-e 9y ago
      macOS High Sierra. I generally have a lot of tabs open: two Inbox tabs, Facebook, StackOverflow chat + question pages for what I'm working on, many JIRA tickets, HN, sometimes Twitch, etc. I think it has something to do with video rendering since opening Twitch/Youtube often causes the problems to start.
      - jdeibele 9y ago
        Try https://addons.mozilla.org/ca/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/ca/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard... I had been using Tab Suspender from the same author but recently noticed that it was deprecated for FF 57 or newer. Pretty happy with it on long-running tabs I check once or twice a day.
teamhappy 9y ago
"Added settings in about:preferences to stop websites from asking to send notifications" Been waiting for this one.
- darkstar999 9y ago
  Yes! That is really being abused. I don't need notifications from recipe sites!
  - koolba 9y ago
    I’ve yet to find a site from which I do want to receive notifications.
    - TremendousJudge 9y ago
      chat apps like discord and slack, mostly
      - barkingcat 9y ago
        Even discord and slack I don't want browser notifications. Inside their own tab, I can deal with ui elements. There's no need nor no want to have a page alert outside of the web page itself.
        zaarn 9y ago
        It can be useful when you get mentioned, like for example, a user has pinged the moderator role where a quick reaction will be necessary. Desktop notifications can significantly reduce reaction time to important events (though, assuming you do the sane and set Discord to only notify you on mentions that aren't @here or @everyone)
        ci5er 9y ago
        If they need an immediate answer, they are not children and know how to use a phone (I would hope).
dreamygeek 9y ago
Mozilla should also be focusing on RAM utilization. If they are doing that on the back end they should explicitly mention it in the update details.
- 0xTJ 9y ago
  They are doing that, with the whole Firefox Quantum thing. I see no need to mention less RAM utilization now given that they reference Quantum. These aren't meant as an advertisement, they are giving the changes since the last update, so there's nothing to say about it. These release notes aren't meant as advertisement.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  There were thousands of changes from Firefox 58 to Firefox 59 (I count > 8900 changesets, though some are merges). The release notes only list the most visible and most unexpected changes. Ongoing memory and performance work rarely clears that bar. It's happening all the time.
symlinkk 9y ago
> Added settings in about:preferences to stop websites from asking to send notifications or access your device’s camera, microphone, and location, while still allowing trusted websites to use these features Good. I get so tired of having to click that little [x] on the location prompt. However it's really just covering up a bigger issue, which is that the permissions prompts in Firefox and Chrome should be redesigned. It would be good if they were designed so that they were still noticeable, but they: * don't cover part of the webpage * don't cover other parts of the browser's UI * and don't take focus away from the webpage
- y03a 9y ago
  That leaves no room for them to appear at all. I'm all for it.
- skellera 9y ago
  Yeah, why isn’t it one of those thin drop down bars at the top that can be closed? Have it go away after a certain number of seconds.
crawdingle 9y ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353319 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353319 - RESOLVED FIXED in Firefox 59, super happy about that.
- severine 9y ago
  I'll save you a click: > Render the HTML preview within the Response side-panel > Component: Developer Tools: Netmonitor > Reported: 11 months ago
Santosh83 9y ago
Although its a minor thing, I'm personally delighted with drag & drop for the new tab tiles. These are the kind of little usability improvements that can tip the finely balanced scales between major browsers these days.
- ksec 9y ago
  I am delighted too. You look at it and you felt as if the Drag and Drop should have been there in the first place. I could only wish they allow 3 rows of Top Site ( without editing about:preference ), and an option to have Open All Top Sites in New Tab. Which is very useful since I check those site daily.
- sixothree 9y ago
  Tab Tiles?
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    Top sites tiles on the new tab page in Firefox. https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/home/new-tab.a1c9f06dcebe.png https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/home/new-tab.a1c9f...
dmix 9y ago
The article about "Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP)"is an interesting read: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/off-main-thread-painting/ https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/off-main-thread-... Great to see so much effort being put into the fundamentals.
odabaxok 9y ago
A little OT, but how can I enable/use the Screenshots feature? I cannot find it.
- teamhappy 9y ago
  Right click -> Take a Screenshot
  - magnetic 9y ago
    Is there a way to trigger a full screen screenshot via Selenium/WebDriver? (not a partial/window screenshot - that I can do)
    - mcintyre1994 9y ago
      If I'm understanding correctly, could you just select the body tag and screenshot that? In Selenium Python that'd be: # driver is a Firefox driver body = driver.find_element_by_tag_name('body') screenshot = body.screenshot_as_base64 # png bytes
      - magnetic 9y ago
        Just tried this - doesn't seem to work: - a lot of (visible) elements are missing - the screenshot is still cropped to whatever viewport is used
        mcintyre1994 9y ago
        Definitely just speculating here, but there is a `driver.save_screenshot(path)` method that would probably be worth trying. This worked for me: from selenium.webdriver import Firefox from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options geckodriver_path = '/usr/local/bin/geckodriver' options = Options() options.add_argument('-headless') driver = Firefox(executable_path=geckodriver_path, firefox_options=options) url='https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576015' driver.get(url) driver.save_screenshot('./hn.png')
dmix 9y ago
> Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers to prevent cross-site tracking Surprised this wasn't done yet.
- Sylos 9y ago
  Well, politics. As a browser vendor, you need to provide webpage owners ways to make (more) money, especially when other browsers that users are happily voting for, do provide these ways.
acaramanamaraca 9y ago
Looks like 'client side decorations' on Linux didn't make this release?
- nine_k 9y ago
  With the tree-style tabs extension, tabs on the top are obsolete :)
- vetinari 9y ago
  CSDs were already in 58 (Customize, Title Bar). What didn't make this release is Wayland support.
  - acaramanamaraca 9y ago
    I think that was only backported into the Fedora version?
    - vetinari 9y ago
      Looks like you are right, I cannot find it in Ubuntu version.
- dschep 9y ago
  Speaking of linux features. Is it me or did it stop using native desktop notifications?
- dao- 9y ago
  Nope: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461
zaarn 9y ago
59 is probably a bit of a less spectacula release than Quantum itself but the recent updates nonetheless bring me joy. The "stop notifying me about permissions and just block it" is something I genuinely didn't know I wanted. Though I do hope (but will have to test later) if this also works for HTML Canvas since I use the additional anti fingerprinting.
marak830 9y ago
Damn I'm excited about this (specifically those damn notification popups!). Slightly off topic: has anyone else been getting frequent crashes lately? It's as if it's running out of memory then freezing a moment. I thought it was because I'm on an older phone at first (note 3 here) but my wife said the same thing to me and she is in an edge 7. (Kinda hoping someone knows a config fix to it haha)
ChrisSD 9y ago
It's great that they're continuing to add back customisation to the new tab page but why am I still restricted to two rows of "top sites"? I'm on a desktop here, I'm not going to run out of pixels. Even on Android I liked having more space for quick links to websites I visit semi-regularly. In fact it was more useful there because there isn't a good way to bring order to the history panel. Is it just to make room for "highlights"? I switched that off because it's utterly useless for me. I don't find it helpful to be shown a random selection of things I've clicked on. Besides, I am capable of scrolling. Yes I know, there's an addon for that (probably). But it just feels like such an arbitrary restriction. Why are only twelve "top sites" allowed?
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  To reply to myself I've found that about:config has `browser.newtabpage.rows` which I can increase. When I do that and restart the browser it resets to 3 but `browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount` is increased and more sites are shown. Changing `browser.newtabpage.columns` doesn't appear to have an effect. My question still stands but at least there's a partial workaround, even if it's potentially unstable. EDIT This setting doesn't appear to be available on Android.
  - aembleton 9y ago
    I've changed the `browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount` to 36 which fills my screen with 6x6 boxes filled with my top sites. Except, for the last box which is always empty! It seems that there is a hard limit in Firefox of 35 top sites.
    - ChrisSD 9y ago
      Did you try restarting your browser? I've just tried setting rows to 12, which sets topSitesCount to 72. This worked for me after restarting the browser.
- ams6110 9y ago
  And why can't I have my home page as my new tab page? I don't want any of that "top sites" BS on a new tab, I want the local HTML file that I created as my home page. Why not allow it for new tabs?
axelfontaine 9y ago
Still no proper Yukikey 2FA support. Github kinda works, Gmail still completely broken. I would love to switch from Chrome for the privacy benefits, but this is an absolute deal-breaker. Edit: There is hope for Firefox 60 or 61 -> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409573 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409573
- nine_k 9y ago
  IIRC it's the problem of Gmail specifically, and how they implemented 2FA. Spec-compliant sites, like Giithub, work.
  - haldean 9y ago
    Yup, Fastmail works too. Actually, with FF58 and the U2F flag switched on, Google is the only site I use where my Yubikey doesn't work.
  - Nokinside 9y ago
    It's the old Microsoft strategy. Break the standard behaviour slightly to make competitors product unusable in your products.
cgrf 9y ago
I'm sad to say that Firefox Quantum will remain useless to me until proper session management is restored. But without even the necessary API to enable features that were provided by the "Session Manager" add-on for many years, this still seems to be a long way off.
sutoor 9y ago
Sadly, still unusable for me since the Quantum update. A clean install and profile, no add-ons, and google.com/maps (for example) will max out my cpu. There must be some bug related to old hardware and OS (Macbook Pro 2009 + 10.11.x) or more people would be experiencing this.
- swypych 9y ago
  I have a 2017 macbook pro, battery life is atrocious with Firefox now. If anyone from the power optimization team is reading this what logs can I provide you?
- DangerousPie 9y ago
  I have been having problems with Google Maps too, and Google Hangouts has been even worse. I'm pretty much at the point now where I have asked people to contact me on different services because Hangouts has become completely unusable. I was assuming that this was just Google not caring about Firefox support. But now that you mention it, this seems to have started around the time of the Quantum update and doesn't affect all my machines. So maybe I'm experiencing this bug as well? I never connected the two things.
  - Macha 9y ago
    Google had a NPAPI plugin for non Chrome browsers and proprietary webRTC extensions for Chrome, so when legacy plugin support was removed, it stopped working for voice/video calls in Firefox. Hangouts Meet is even worse, being Chrome only, though officially Google was looking into it.
- rehemiau 9y ago
  I noticed that too. Firefox does not work efficiently on macOS, unfortunately. Additionally, Google doesn't do much to fix their web apps performance on Firefox. I even suspect the contrary.
  - adamch 9y ago
    I suspect Google engineers have more important tickets to work on than "do a bunch of complicated VM analysis to slow down Maps on Firefox."
CoffeeDregs 9y ago
Switched to FF Nightly from Chrome about 6 months ago because Chrome's memory usage was awful. Firefox has been much better, especially since I modified the following in about:config: browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers => 0 dom.ipc.processCount => 1
- jadbox 9y ago
  Isn't limiting the ipc processes severely capping (CPU) performance?
  - zaarn 9y ago
    It's a tradeoff, IMO. Either you spare a few CPU cycles or a bit of memory. Though chrome doesn't seem to be doing good on either front.
  - CoffeeDregs 9y ago
    I haven't really noticed much of a difference in performance but memory usage is much lower.
  - Sylos 9y ago
    It will cause all your tabs to run in one process, so only one CPU core can do work there. This will especially be noticeable when multiple tabs are actively doing something, for example if you open up multiple tabs at once or background tracking script are stealing your CPU cycles. Blocking tracking scripts and ads or just JavaScript in general can alleviate this to the point where you won't really notice.
Tepix 9y ago
Congratulations! What's the memory usage like compare to earlier versions?
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  Looking at that bug, one problem with implementing the nonstandard "mousewheel" event is that the browsers that implement it have different behavior in terms of what the delta value means, so sites using it tend to do browser sniffing to decide how to handle it. Which means implementing it is likely to break sites unless you exactly match the UA string and behavior of some other browser. Given that, and given that Firefox does support the per-standard "wheel" event, what is the argument for implementing "mousewheel"?
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    (I think this comment was meant to be posted somewhere else…)
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      No, I posted it in the right place. Tepix subsequently edited his/her comment, as far as I can tell. The comment I was replying to, about "mousewheel" events, is certainly no longer in evidence.
      - Tepix 9y ago
        Sorry about that, i changed my comment because it was obsolete and i could no longer delete it.
        bzbarsky 9y ago
        Next time it might make sense to make it clear that the comment was edited and how... ;)
Flimm 9y ago
Firefox 59 is the first Firefox release to support SameSite cookie attribute, joining Chrome. > Same-site cookies ("First-Party-Only" or "First-Party") allow servers to mitigate the risk of CSRF and information leakage attacks by asserting that a particular cookie should only be sent with requests initiated from the same registrable domain. I like this one!
- lloeki 9y ago
  How does this play out WRT "Block 3rd party cookies" (which wasn't on by default on Fx and Cr but was on Safari since an eternity?)
  - kibwen 9y ago
    It sounds like they serve totally different purposes, where one is a server-side tool to improve security, and the other is a client-side tool to improve privacy.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    Note that the definition of "Block 3rd party cookies" in Safari is different from the one in Firefox (not sure about Chrome). Firefox blocks a lot more stuff when that option is enabled in Firefox than Safari does when its option is enabled, which causes more web compat problems.
    - driverdan 9y ago
      Blocking 3rd party cookies causes very few problems. I've blocked them for many years and have seen fewer than 10 sites it caused problems with. For those you can whitelist the domain.
      - saberworks 9y ago
        My experience has been the opposite. It breaks every Amazon Pay integration and a lot of Paypal integrations as well. It also breaks online banking for the two credit unions I use, both of which seem to use some 3rd party service to run their backends. And then just whitelisting the domain isn't a great solution because then that means they can drop any 3rd party cookies, not just the desirable ones. So suddenly my online banking works, but now I've got google trackers and whatever other crap they want to drop. I believe I was able to whitelist just those cookies but that was quite a few versions ago and the interface is different now so I can't find where I did it. The cookie interface is really terribe; when you go to the site information it tells you whether the site is storing any cookies, and many times it says "No" but if you click the "view cookies" link it shows a ton of them. This happens when the domain doesn't match exactly (for example www.example.com vs example.com) so you can't really trust the Yes|No info box.
floatboth 9y ago
> Added support for W3C specs for pointer events and improved platform integration with added device support for mouse, pen, and touch screen pointer input ohh yeah finally! I somehow missed that even though I'm following Nightly.
childintime 9y ago
Sadly no news on the Web-extensions front. Several of my extensions continue broken.
- proaralyst 9y ago
  What news are you looking for? I'm fairly sure extensions targeting the older APIs will not be supported in any future release.
  - Kliment 9y ago
    We're waiting for the webextensions API to be extended with a bunch of missing functionality so that extension authors can reimplement things that were made impossible when the older APIs were deprecated. This is something that ideally should have been done before or shortly after the quantum release but was not seen as a priority.
  - Crespyl 9y ago
    Old extensions won't ever really work again, but part of me is still kind of holding out hope for WebExtensions API features for things like "allow extension on 'system' pages (new tab, settings, etc)", "focus addressbar", "hide/replace address/tab bars", etc. Some of those are coming or pretty much ready (tab hiding, addressbar focus), and others I've almost given up on, given how Mozilla seems to have changed their philosophy.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  That's unfortunate. I finally gave up on Firefox as my main browser when 57 came out, and one of the big reasons was that so many of the useful extensions that had set Firefox above other browsers for me were broken and didn't have good replacements. In some of those cases, my understanding is that you can't currently write a direct replacement because the new API doesn't support the required functionality. I was really hoping that by two releases later these kinds of issues would have been addressed and new Firefox would at least not be worse than old Firefox in this respect. :-(
  - 9y ago
John_KZ 9y ago
Firefox is dead to me ever since they killed their addons and marketed it as a step forward. If I wanted to use Chrome I'd use fucking Chrome.
- the_grue 9y ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted. I have the same problem. I'm still stuck with Firefox 56 and no upgrade path in sight. I wish Mozilla declared FF 56 a LTS release for those of us who value their addons more than performance benefits of Quantum. Right now I'm still using an out-of-date release that doesn't receive critical security updates, and I have to choose between either downgrading 4 releases down to FF 52 (bad) or upgrading beyond FF 57 and losing addons that I came to rely on (unacceptable).
  - purerandomness 9y ago
    Which are the addons you're missing? Do they have a GitHub site?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      I miss Tab Groups, FWIW. Why does it matter if they're on GitHub? Firefox no longer has the APIs for many of these extensions to be possible.
      - WalterGR 9y ago
        Why does it matter if they're on GitHub? I'm not OP, but usually the conversation goes like this: Person 1: <describes problem with open source software> Person 2: It's open source. Have you submitted a patch yet?
        the_grue 9y ago
        I don't have an example handy, but when FF 57 was first released, I actually took the effort to check what are the prospects of extensions I use in future FF versions. I found at least one extension which required a feature that FF developers refused to fix because it would expose APIs they didn't want to expose, end of story. So it's not just a matter of "scratching your own itch", a lot of it is politics.
ppbutt 9y ago
Does this include the forced collection of the user's usage data?
- MikkoFinell 9y ago
  Better stay away from the evil Mozilla corporation, and instead use one of those other, more privacy-aware, browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    That did not answer the question, and in light of discussions just a few weeks ago on this subject, the question was fair.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    It's okay to do bad things so long as your main competition is worse?
    - abiox 9y ago
      wrt to satisfying every single extant ideological constraint that determines 'good' or 'bad', yes. a pragmatic assessment is that, due to it not being possible to satisfy contradicting constraints, it is thusly 'okay' to not do the impossible.
- ac29 9y ago
  Telemetry is opt-in, and can be turned off at about:preferences#privacy
nokcha 9y ago
Has the issue with HSTS supercookies leaking into Private Browsing mode been fixed yet?
- coolspot 9y ago
  Relevant Mozilla and Chromium bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=930638 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=930638 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232961 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232961 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=104935 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=104935
exodust 9y ago
Won't be updating beyond FF 55.0.3 because 'Status-4-Evar' add-on doesn't work with Quantum. Apparently it can't be updated to work with Quantum for reasons I don't know, but was mentioned on the support forum. Until such time as I can prevent the annoying floating URL pop-up in bottom corner when hovering over links, I won't be updating. I don't see why I can't have a harmless fixed status bar extending 100% at bottom of window. It creates a nice gap between Windows taskbar and the browser, with the URL hover text contained neatly within and doesn't appear over the page as an irritating floating layer. Is it law at Mozilla that FF must imitate Chrome on interface style? Perhaps my choice of wanting choice is the wrong choice. Perhaps it's my fault as user, for wanting something that was taken away. Another add-on I liked, now kaput, is Mozilla's own Lightbeam. The important list view and domain blocking function of that extension has been broken for some time. The march towards the "best browser" seems to involve breaking things and pissing people off.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Used to prefer the status bar but am sort of used to not having it now. But I think the new way is broken also. Don't see why I have to look down to see the link target. Why can't it be a tooltip at the mouse pointer, perhaps below any alt text?
  - exodust 9y ago
    I would not choose to have a tooltip link hover, but you should be allowed to have it if you want. Via options, about:config, or possible via an extension. In UI terms, the concept of a fixed footer is well established. We see it often on sites and applications. FF allows adjustment of the millisecond delay of the link text, but no control over other properties of that element. I don't get the logic. When vendors move the furniture around in their "security updates" it makes me distrust the updates, particularly when the furniture can't be moved back to how it looked before.
grok2 9y ago
After I switched to Firefox 59 beta on Windows (7 upgraded to 10), I see the following issue all the time. When accessing finance.google.com in one tab and etrade.com (internal page) in another, if I am on finance.google.com and if it refreshes and is slow for some reason I start seeing a blank page with a spinner on that tab and while this is happening, if I switch to the etrade.com tab, I see that page is blank too and has a spinner that doesn't refresh until the finance.google.com tab comes back -- almost like the browser is stuck in a system call somewhere and all tabs using javascript are blocked. Maybe it's likely some interaction with some addons I have (mostly NoScript), but it's been frustrating and for the first time in so many years I am considering switching browsers :-(. BTW, where is the best way to ask about issues like this regarding Firefox, it seems like Googling for Firefox issues mostly only brings up years old issues and no one is publically posting about more recent issues like this. Also it's hard to describe problems like this in a reasonable way to come up with search terms that Google likes and doesn't hit old reported problems.
- youseecomrade 9y ago
  Not sure it's related but a lot of Google's sites are terrible on Firefox and Edge. IIRC they are using polyfills for some heavy stuff (if you assume no malice, that's probably the cause of many problems). https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox https://support.mozilla.org/ https://support.mozilla.org/ Try using safe-mode https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-is... or maybe creating a new profile. The beta versions, just like Chromium or Chrome, occasionally have some weird bugs. At least for me most of them are always hardware acceleration related.
  - flamtap 9y ago
    I've had trouble accessing the Google Analytics dashboard(s) in FF as well. Nothing gets rendered except the background gradient. In the interest of not using Chrome though, when I run into such issues I use Brave as it's Chromium-based and thus allows me to side-step those problems.
andrepd 9y ago
Still on 56, sadly. The addons crucial for my workflow have stopped working. Shame these concerns were not properly addressed, even after months of clamour about breaking changes like these.
- robbyt 9y ago
  What add-ons?
  - smileypete 9y ago
    For me it's LiveClick. http://projects.protej.com/liveclick/ http://projects.protej.com/liveclick/ 'Display preview in live bookmark item tooltip' and 'keep menu open after middle clicking items' are worth me staying on FF 55 for the time being. Sure I have tried upgrading and using other addons but nothing really does as well for me as this addon.
- StapleHorse 9y ago
  Same here. But I use the ESR version which is still mantained with security updates, right now its at 52.7 For me, it's: save MAFF format, foxyproxy, downthemall, "Image and flash blocker", tab mix plus, self exploding cookies, Torrent Status Tool. It's sad.I guess I'm getting old and grumpy.
Something1234 9y ago
Is allow client side decorations available yet in about:config? It was in a fedora release about 2 months ago, and it was removed because it wasn't in mainline. I have the title bar disabled for now, but that's broken in it's own way(dragging doesn't work right).
- dao- 9y ago
  No, it wasn't ready: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461 Should be part of Firefox 60.
  - Something1234 9y ago
    That's a shame. Client side decoration seemed ready when it was enabled on Fedora.
armandduijn 9y ago
> Improved graphics rendering using Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP) for Mac users Does this update improve its power consumption? Currently, Firefox has a significantly larger effect on my MacBook's battery life compared to Safari with similar usage.
- mbesto 9y ago
  Ya, I'm really disappointed with the battery consumption on FF, almost wanting me to move back to Chrome (shudder).
Aelius 9y ago
More good news: expect to see Fx60 on Fdroid. https://forum.f-droid.org/t/making-it-easier-for-f-droid-to-package-mozilla-firefox/1649/14 https://forum.f-droid.org/t/making-it-easier-for-f-droid-to-...
gdulli 9y ago
Did they fix the bug introduced with multi-process where select lists in their popped-up state don't respect css styles?
chmln 9y ago
Firefox gets raving feedback here, but for me it is unusably slow on a Linux machine. While websites do render fast, the UI is not very responsive, whether its laggy typing into the address bar [1] or the crawling devtools. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699
- jcadam 9y ago
  I switched back to Firefox for dev work on my system (Arch Linux), because Chrome would slow to a crawl with its devtools open. Firefox (since quantum) seems to fare better.
- dxxvi 9y ago
  I also use Arch and Firefox Beta daily at home. Don't see any issue.
szemet 9y ago
Can't find in the release notes: Is the Android version now based on quantum as the desktop version? As it was promised a few months back: https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/09/26/project-quantum-enhancements-wont-arrive-firefox-57-android/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/09/26/project-quantum-enh...
- ac29 9y ago
  One of the major Quantum improvements, Stylo, isn't coming to Android until Firefox 60: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366049 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366049 Unfortunately, it'll still be pretty slow until then.
superdaniel 9y ago
cmd+f,"u2f" or "webauth" Nothing.. I wonder when they'll ever get to fully supporting u2f (probably via webauth) so I don't have to use Chrome to log into certain websites.
- cpeterso 9y ago
  Mozilla will ship the Webauthn API in Firefox 60 (May 9): https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/using-hardware-token-based-2fa-with-the-webauthn-api/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/using-hardware-token-based...
Grollicus 9y ago
Can someone tell me what's behind "Faster load times for content on the Firefox Home page"?
ams6110 9y ago
I use Firefox Focus on my phone (android). Anyone know if it tracks the full Firefox releases or is it something completely separate?
- Sylos 9y ago
  It's completely separate. As in, it doesn't even use Gecko, it uses the native web engine of iOS/Android, so that's WebKit / Android Webview. With how many trackers and ads they block in Focus by default, they wouldn't exactly motivate webpage owners to support Gecko anyways, if they'd use Gecko in it. This is the current release notes of Firefox Focus on Android: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/whats-new-focus-android-4 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/whats-new-focus-android...
MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP) for Mac users is some good stuff. FF is now noticeably smoother. Nice!
esturk 9y ago
Does anyone know why Alt+D doesn't focus into the Address Bar anymore? (I thought the behavior was suppose to be like Ctrl+L) I'm on Linux.

394 points by dikiaap 9y ago

I switched to Firefox from Chrome at 58. I've been very happy with the experience all around. Keep up the good work, Mozilla!

trevor-e 9y ago
I too switched for several months, but am already back to using Chrome. Even with the performance improvements, it's still noticeably slower than Chrome.
- syeaj 9y ago
  I'm curious: what OS do you use and what sites are you visiting? I've had a stellar experience on Arch Linux. The RAM usage is down. I can't say I really ever found Chrome slow, but nor is Firefox for me. I think they're both plenty fast, but I prefer sites without lots of garbage flying around on the page anyway.
  - trevor-e 9y ago
    macOS High Sierra. I generally have a lot of tabs open: two Inbox tabs, Facebook, StackOverflow chat + question pages for what I'm working on, many JIRA tickets, HN, sometimes Twitch, etc. I think it has something to do with video rendering since opening Twitch/Youtube often causes the problems to start.
    - jdeibele 9y ago
      Try https://addons.mozilla.org/ca/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/ca/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard... I had been using Tab Suspender from the same author but recently noticed that it was deprecated for FF 57 or newer. Pretty happy with it on long-running tabs I check once or twice a day.

teamhappy 9y ago

"Added settings in about:preferences to stop websites from asking to send notifications" Been waiting for this one.

darkstar999 9y ago
Yes! That is really being abused. I don't need notifications from recipe sites!
- koolba 9y ago
  I’ve yet to find a site from which I do want to receive notifications.
  - TremendousJudge 9y ago
    chat apps like discord and slack, mostly
    - barkingcat 9y ago
      Even discord and slack I don't want browser notifications. Inside their own tab, I can deal with ui elements. There's no need nor no want to have a page alert outside of the web page itself.
      - zaarn 9y ago
        It can be useful when you get mentioned, like for example, a user has pinged the moderator role where a quick reaction will be necessary. Desktop notifications can significantly reduce reaction time to important events (though, assuming you do the sane and set Discord to only notify you on mentions that aren't @here or @everyone)
        ci5er 9y ago
        If they need an immediate answer, they are not children and know how to use a phone (I would hope).

dreamygeek 9y ago

Mozilla should also be focusing on RAM utilization. If they are doing that on the back end they should explicitly mention it in the update details.

0xTJ 9y ago
They are doing that, with the whole Firefox Quantum thing. I see no need to mention less RAM utilization now given that they reference Quantum. These aren't meant as an advertisement, they are giving the changes since the last update, so there's nothing to say about it. These release notes aren't meant as advertisement.
bzbarsky 9y ago
There were thousands of changes from Firefox 58 to Firefox 59 (I count > 8900 changesets, though some are merges). The release notes only list the most visible and most unexpected changes. Ongoing memory and performance work rarely clears that bar. It's happening all the time.

symlinkk 9y ago

> Added settings in about:preferences to stop websites from asking to send notifications or access your device’s camera, microphone, and location, while still allowing trusted websites to use these features Good. I get so tired of having to click that little [x] on the location prompt. However it's really just covering up a bigger issue, which is that the permissions prompts in Firefox and Chrome should be redesigned. It would be good if they were designed so that they were still noticeable, but they: * don't cover part of the webpage * don't cover other parts of the browser's UI * and don't take focus away from the webpage

y03a 9y ago
That leaves no room for them to appear at all. I'm all for it.
skellera 9y ago
Yeah, why isn’t it one of those thin drop down bars at the top that can be closed? Have it go away after a certain number of seconds.

crawdingle 9y ago

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353319 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353319 - RESOLVED FIXED in Firefox 59, super happy about that.

severine 9y ago
I'll save you a click: > Render the HTML preview within the Response side-panel > Component: Developer Tools: Netmonitor > Reported: 11 months ago

Santosh83 9y ago

Although its a minor thing, I'm personally delighted with drag & drop for the new tab tiles. These are the kind of little usability improvements that can tip the finely balanced scales between major browsers these days.

ksec 9y ago
I am delighted too. You look at it and you felt as if the Drag and Drop should have been there in the first place. I could only wish they allow 3 rows of Top Site ( without editing about:preference ), and an option to have Open All Top Sites in New Tab. Which is very useful since I check those site daily.
sixothree 9y ago
Tab Tiles?
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Top sites tiles on the new tab page in Firefox. https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/home/new-tab.a1c9f06dcebe.png https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/home/new-tab.a1c9f...

dmix 9y ago

The article about "Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP)"is an interesting read: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/off-main-thread-painting/ https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/off-main-thread-... Great to see so much effort being put into the fundamentals.

odabaxok 9y ago

A little OT, but how can I enable/use the Screenshots feature? I cannot find it.

teamhappy 9y ago
Right click -> Take a Screenshot
- magnetic 9y ago
  Is there a way to trigger a full screen screenshot via Selenium/WebDriver? (not a partial/window screenshot - that I can do)
  - mcintyre1994 9y ago
    If I'm understanding correctly, could you just select the body tag and screenshot that? In Selenium Python that'd be: # driver is a Firefox driver body = driver.find_element_by_tag_name('body') screenshot = body.screenshot_as_base64 # png bytes
    - magnetic 9y ago
      Just tried this - doesn't seem to work: - a lot of (visible) elements are missing - the screenshot is still cropped to whatever viewport is used
      - mcintyre1994 9y ago
        Definitely just speculating here, but there is a `driver.save_screenshot(path)` method that would probably be worth trying. This worked for me: from selenium.webdriver import Firefox from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options geckodriver_path = '/usr/local/bin/geckodriver' options = Options() options.add_argument('-headless') driver = Firefox(executable_path=geckodriver_path, firefox_options=options) url='https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576015' driver.get(url) driver.save_screenshot('./hn.png')

dmix 9y ago

> Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers to prevent cross-site tracking Surprised this wasn't done yet.

Sylos 9y ago
Well, politics. As a browser vendor, you need to provide webpage owners ways to make (more) money, especially when other browsers that users are happily voting for, do provide these ways.

acaramanamaraca 9y ago

Looks like 'client side decorations' on Linux didn't make this release?

nine_k 9y ago
With the tree-style tabs extension, tabs on the top are obsolete :)
vetinari 9y ago
CSDs were already in 58 (Customize, Title Bar). What didn't make this release is Wayland support.
- acaramanamaraca 9y ago
  I think that was only backported into the Fedora version?
  - vetinari 9y ago
    Looks like you are right, I cannot find it in Ubuntu version.
dschep 9y ago
Speaking of linux features. Is it me or did it stop using native desktop notifications?
dao- 9y ago
Nope: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461

zaarn 9y ago

59 is probably a bit of a less spectacula release than Quantum itself but the recent updates nonetheless bring me joy. The "stop notifying me about permissions and just block it" is something I genuinely didn't know I wanted. Though I do hope (but will have to test later) if this also works for HTML Canvas since I use the additional anti fingerprinting.

marak830 9y ago

Damn I'm excited about this (specifically those damn notification popups!). Slightly off topic: has anyone else been getting frequent crashes lately? It's as if it's running out of memory then freezing a moment. I thought it was because I'm on an older phone at first (note 3 here) but my wife said the same thing to me and she is in an edge 7. (Kinda hoping someone knows a config fix to it haha)

ChrisSD 9y ago

It's great that they're continuing to add back customisation to the new tab page but why am I still restricted to two rows of "top sites"? I'm on a desktop here, I'm not going to run out of pixels. Even on Android I liked having more space for quick links to websites I visit semi-regularly. In fact it was more useful there because there isn't a good way to bring order to the history panel. Is it just to make room for "highlights"? I switched that off because it's utterly useless for me. I don't find it helpful to be shown a random selection of things I've clicked on. Besides, I am capable of scrolling. Yes I know, there's an addon for that (probably). But it just feels like such an arbitrary restriction. Why are only twelve "top sites" allowed?

ChrisSD 9y ago
To reply to myself I've found that about:config has `browser.newtabpage.rows` which I can increase. When I do that and restart the browser it resets to 3 but `browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount` is increased and more sites are shown. Changing `browser.newtabpage.columns` doesn't appear to have an effect. My question still stands but at least there's a partial workaround, even if it's potentially unstable. EDIT This setting doesn't appear to be available on Android.
- aembleton 9y ago
  I've changed the `browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount` to 36 which fills my screen with 6x6 boxes filled with my top sites. Except, for the last box which is always empty! It seems that there is a hard limit in Firefox of 35 top sites.
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    Did you try restarting your browser? I've just tried setting rows to 12, which sets topSitesCount to 72. This worked for me after restarting the browser.
ams6110 9y ago
And why can't I have my home page as my new tab page? I don't want any of that "top sites" BS on a new tab, I want the local HTML file that I created as my home page. Why not allow it for new tabs?

axelfontaine 9y ago

Still no proper Yukikey 2FA support. Github kinda works, Gmail still completely broken. I would love to switch from Chrome for the privacy benefits, but this is an absolute deal-breaker. Edit: There is hope for Firefox 60 or 61 -> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409573 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409573

nine_k 9y ago
IIRC it's the problem of Gmail specifically, and how they implemented 2FA. Spec-compliant sites, like Giithub, work.
- haldean 9y ago
  Yup, Fastmail works too. Actually, with FF58 and the U2F flag switched on, Google is the only site I use where my Yubikey doesn't work.
- Nokinside 9y ago
  It's the old Microsoft strategy. Break the standard behaviour slightly to make competitors product unusable in your products.

cgrf 9y ago

I'm sad to say that Firefox Quantum will remain useless to me until proper session management is restored. But without even the necessary API to enable features that were provided by the "Session Manager" add-on for many years, this still seems to be a long way off.

sutoor 9y ago

Sadly, still unusable for me since the Quantum update. A clean install and profile, no add-ons, and google.com/maps (for example) will max out my cpu. There must be some bug related to old hardware and OS (Macbook Pro 2009 + 10.11.x) or more people would be experiencing this.

swypych 9y ago
I have a 2017 macbook pro, battery life is atrocious with Firefox now. If anyone from the power optimization team is reading this what logs can I provide you?
DangerousPie 9y ago
I have been having problems with Google Maps too, and Google Hangouts has been even worse. I'm pretty much at the point now where I have asked people to contact me on different services because Hangouts has become completely unusable. I was assuming that this was just Google not caring about Firefox support. But now that you mention it, this seems to have started around the time of the Quantum update and doesn't affect all my machines. So maybe I'm experiencing this bug as well? I never connected the two things.
- Macha 9y ago
  Google had a NPAPI plugin for non Chrome browsers and proprietary webRTC extensions for Chrome, so when legacy plugin support was removed, it stopped working for voice/video calls in Firefox. Hangouts Meet is even worse, being Chrome only, though officially Google was looking into it.
rehemiau 9y ago
I noticed that too. Firefox does not work efficiently on macOS, unfortunately. Additionally, Google doesn't do much to fix their web apps performance on Firefox. I even suspect the contrary.
- adamch 9y ago
  I suspect Google engineers have more important tickets to work on than "do a bunch of complicated VM analysis to slow down Maps on Firefox."

CoffeeDregs 9y ago

Switched to FF Nightly from Chrome about 6 months ago because Chrome's memory usage was awful. Firefox has been much better, especially since I modified the following in about:config: browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers => 0 dom.ipc.processCount => 1

jadbox 9y ago
Isn't limiting the ipc processes severely capping (CPU) performance?
- zaarn 9y ago
  It's a tradeoff, IMO. Either you spare a few CPU cycles or a bit of memory. Though chrome doesn't seem to be doing good on either front.
- CoffeeDregs 9y ago
  I haven't really noticed much of a difference in performance but memory usage is much lower.
- Sylos 9y ago
  It will cause all your tabs to run in one process, so only one CPU core can do work there. This will especially be noticeable when multiple tabs are actively doing something, for example if you open up multiple tabs at once or background tracking script are stealing your CPU cycles. Blocking tracking scripts and ads or just JavaScript in general can alleviate this to the point where you won't really notice.

Tepix 9y ago

Congratulations! What's the memory usage like compare to earlier versions?

bzbarsky 9y ago
Looking at that bug, one problem with implementing the nonstandard "mousewheel" event is that the browsers that implement it have different behavior in terms of what the delta value means, so sites using it tend to do browser sniffing to decide how to handle it. Which means implementing it is likely to break sites unless you exactly match the UA string and behavior of some other browser. Given that, and given that Firefox does support the per-standard "wheel" event, what is the argument for implementing "mousewheel"?
- pcwalton 9y ago
  (I think this comment was meant to be posted somewhere else…)
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    No, I posted it in the right place. Tepix subsequently edited his/her comment, as far as I can tell. The comment I was replying to, about "mousewheel" events, is certainly no longer in evidence.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      Sorry about that, i changed my comment because it was obsolete and i could no longer delete it.
      - bzbarsky 9y ago
        Next time it might make sense to make it clear that the comment was edited and how... ;)

Flimm 9y ago

Firefox 59 is the first Firefox release to support SameSite cookie attribute, joining Chrome. > Same-site cookies ("First-Party-Only" or "First-Party") allow servers to mitigate the risk of CSRF and information leakage attacks by asserting that a particular cookie should only be sent with requests initiated from the same registrable domain. I like this one!

lloeki 9y ago
How does this play out WRT "Block 3rd party cookies" (which wasn't on by default on Fx and Cr but was on Safari since an eternity?)
- kibwen 9y ago
  It sounds like they serve totally different purposes, where one is a server-side tool to improve security, and the other is a client-side tool to improve privacy.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  Note that the definition of "Block 3rd party cookies" in Safari is different from the one in Firefox (not sure about Chrome). Firefox blocks a lot more stuff when that option is enabled in Firefox than Safari does when its option is enabled, which causes more web compat problems.
  - driverdan 9y ago
    Blocking 3rd party cookies causes very few problems. I've blocked them for many years and have seen fewer than 10 sites it caused problems with. For those you can whitelist the domain.
    - saberworks 9y ago
      My experience has been the opposite. It breaks every Amazon Pay integration and a lot of Paypal integrations as well. It also breaks online banking for the two credit unions I use, both of which seem to use some 3rd party service to run their backends. And then just whitelisting the domain isn't a great solution because then that means they can drop any 3rd party cookies, not just the desirable ones. So suddenly my online banking works, but now I've got google trackers and whatever other crap they want to drop. I believe I was able to whitelist just those cookies but that was quite a few versions ago and the interface is different now so I can't find where I did it. The cookie interface is really terribe; when you go to the site information it tells you whether the site is storing any cookies, and many times it says "No" but if you click the "view cookies" link it shows a ton of them. This happens when the domain doesn't match exactly (for example www.example.com vs example.com) so you can't really trust the Yes|No info box.

floatboth 9y ago

> Added support for W3C specs for pointer events and improved platform integration with added device support for mouse, pen, and touch screen pointer input ohh yeah finally! I somehow missed that even though I'm following Nightly.

childintime 9y ago

Sadly no news on the Web-extensions front. Several of my extensions continue broken.

proaralyst 9y ago
What news are you looking for? I'm fairly sure extensions targeting the older APIs will not be supported in any future release.
- Kliment 9y ago
  We're waiting for the webextensions API to be extended with a bunch of missing functionality so that extension authors can reimplement things that were made impossible when the older APIs were deprecated. This is something that ideally should have been done before or shortly after the quantum release but was not seen as a priority.
- Crespyl 9y ago
  Old extensions won't ever really work again, but part of me is still kind of holding out hope for WebExtensions API features for things like "allow extension on 'system' pages (new tab, settings, etc)", "focus addressbar", "hide/replace address/tab bars", etc. Some of those are coming or pretty much ready (tab hiding, addressbar focus), and others I've almost given up on, given how Mozilla seems to have changed their philosophy.
Silhouette 9y ago
That's unfortunate. I finally gave up on Firefox as my main browser when 57 came out, and one of the big reasons was that so many of the useful extensions that had set Firefox above other browsers for me were broken and didn't have good replacements. In some of those cases, my understanding is that you can't currently write a direct replacement because the new API doesn't support the required functionality. I was really hoping that by two releases later these kinds of issues would have been addressed and new Firefox would at least not be worse than old Firefox in this respect. :-(
- 9y ago

John_KZ 9y ago

Firefox is dead to me ever since they killed their addons and marketed it as a step forward. If I wanted to use Chrome I'd use fucking Chrome.

the_grue 9y ago
I don't know why you are being downvoted. I have the same problem. I'm still stuck with Firefox 56 and no upgrade path in sight. I wish Mozilla declared FF 56 a LTS release for those of us who value their addons more than performance benefits of Quantum. Right now I'm still using an out-of-date release that doesn't receive critical security updates, and I have to choose between either downgrading 4 releases down to FF 52 (bad) or upgrading beyond FF 57 and losing addons that I came to rely on (unacceptable).
- purerandomness 9y ago
  Which are the addons you're missing? Do they have a GitHub site?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    I miss Tab Groups, FWIW. Why does it matter if they're on GitHub? Firefox no longer has the APIs for many of these extensions to be possible.
    - WalterGR 9y ago
      Why does it matter if they're on GitHub? I'm not OP, but usually the conversation goes like this: Person 1: <describes problem with open source software> Person 2: It's open source. Have you submitted a patch yet?
      - the_grue 9y ago
        I don't have an example handy, but when FF 57 was first released, I actually took the effort to check what are the prospects of extensions I use in future FF versions. I found at least one extension which required a feature that FF developers refused to fix because it would expose APIs they didn't want to expose, end of story. So it's not just a matter of "scratching your own itch", a lot of it is politics.

ppbutt 9y ago

Does this include the forced collection of the user's usage data?

MikkoFinell 9y ago
Better stay away from the evil Mozilla corporation, and instead use one of those other, more privacy-aware, browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  That did not answer the question, and in light of discussions just a few weeks ago on this subject, the question was fair.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  It's okay to do bad things so long as your main competition is worse?
  - abiox 9y ago
    wrt to satisfying every single extant ideological constraint that determines 'good' or 'bad', yes. a pragmatic assessment is that, due to it not being possible to satisfy contradicting constraints, it is thusly 'okay' to not do the impossible.
ac29 9y ago
Telemetry is opt-in, and can be turned off at about:preferences#privacy

nokcha 9y ago

Has the issue with HSTS supercookies leaking into Private Browsing mode been fixed yet?

coolspot 9y ago
Relevant Mozilla and Chromium bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=930638 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=930638 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232961 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232961 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=104935 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=104935

exodust 9y ago

Won't be updating beyond FF 55.0.3 because 'Status-4-Evar' add-on doesn't work with Quantum. Apparently it can't be updated to work with Quantum for reasons I don't know, but was mentioned on the support forum. Until such time as I can prevent the annoying floating URL pop-up in bottom corner when hovering over links, I won't be updating. I don't see why I can't have a harmless fixed status bar extending 100% at bottom of window. It creates a nice gap between Windows taskbar and the browser, with the URL hover text contained neatly within and doesn't appear over the page as an irritating floating layer. Is it law at Mozilla that FF must imitate Chrome on interface style? Perhaps my choice of wanting choice is the wrong choice. Perhaps it's my fault as user, for wanting something that was taken away. Another add-on I liked, now kaput, is Mozilla's own Lightbeam. The important list view and domain blocking function of that extension has been broken for some time. The march towards the "best browser" seems to involve breaking things and pissing people off.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Used to prefer the status bar but am sort of used to not having it now. But I think the new way is broken also. Don't see why I have to look down to see the link target. Why can't it be a tooltip at the mouse pointer, perhaps below any alt text?
- exodust 9y ago
  I would not choose to have a tooltip link hover, but you should be allowed to have it if you want. Via options, about:config, or possible via an extension. In UI terms, the concept of a fixed footer is well established. We see it often on sites and applications. FF allows adjustment of the millisecond delay of the link text, but no control over other properties of that element. I don't get the logic. When vendors move the furniture around in their "security updates" it makes me distrust the updates, particularly when the furniture can't be moved back to how it looked before.

grok2 9y ago

After I switched to Firefox 59 beta on Windows (7 upgraded to 10), I see the following issue all the time. When accessing finance.google.com in one tab and etrade.com (internal page) in another, if I am on finance.google.com and if it refreshes and is slow for some reason I start seeing a blank page with a spinner on that tab and while this is happening, if I switch to the etrade.com tab, I see that page is blank too and has a spinner that doesn't refresh until the finance.google.com tab comes back -- almost like the browser is stuck in a system call somewhere and all tabs using javascript are blocked. Maybe it's likely some interaction with some addons I have (mostly NoScript), but it's been frustrating and for the first time in so many years I am considering switching browsers :-(. BTW, where is the best way to ask about issues like this regarding Firefox, it seems like Googling for Firefox issues mostly only brings up years old issues and no one is publically posting about more recent issues like this. Also it's hard to describe problems like this in a reasonable way to come up with search terms that Google likes and doesn't hit old reported problems.

youseecomrade 9y ago
Not sure it's related but a lot of Google's sites are terrible on Firefox and Edge. IIRC they are using polyfills for some heavy stuff (if you assume no malice, that's probably the cause of many problems). https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox https://support.mozilla.org/ https://support.mozilla.org/ Try using safe-mode https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-is... or maybe creating a new profile. The beta versions, just like Chromium or Chrome, occasionally have some weird bugs. At least for me most of them are always hardware acceleration related.
- flamtap 9y ago
  I've had trouble accessing the Google Analytics dashboard(s) in FF as well. Nothing gets rendered except the background gradient. In the interest of not using Chrome though, when I run into such issues I use Brave as it's Chromium-based and thus allows me to side-step those problems.

andrepd 9y ago

Still on 56, sadly. The addons crucial for my workflow have stopped working. Shame these concerns were not properly addressed, even after months of clamour about breaking changes like these.

robbyt 9y ago
What add-ons?
- smileypete 9y ago
  For me it's LiveClick. http://projects.protej.com/liveclick/ http://projects.protej.com/liveclick/ 'Display preview in live bookmark item tooltip' and 'keep menu open after middle clicking items' are worth me staying on FF 55 for the time being. Sure I have tried upgrading and using other addons but nothing really does as well for me as this addon.
StapleHorse 9y ago
Same here. But I use the ESR version which is still mantained with security updates, right now its at 52.7 For me, it's: save MAFF format, foxyproxy, downthemall, "Image and flash blocker", tab mix plus, self exploding cookies, Torrent Status Tool. It's sad.I guess I'm getting old and grumpy.

Something1234 9y ago

Is allow client side decorations available yet in about:config? It was in a fedora release about 2 months ago, and it was removed because it wasn't in mainline. I have the title bar disabled for now, but that's broken in it's own way(dragging doesn't work right).

dao- 9y ago
No, it wasn't ready: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1440461 Should be part of Firefox 60.
- Something1234 9y ago
  That's a shame. Client side decoration seemed ready when it was enabled on Fedora.

armandduijn 9y ago

> Improved graphics rendering using Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP) for Mac users Does this update improve its power consumption? Currently, Firefox has a significantly larger effect on my MacBook's battery life compared to Safari with similar usage.

mbesto 9y ago
Ya, I'm really disappointed with the battery consumption on FF, almost wanting me to move back to Chrome (shudder).

Aelius 9y ago

More good news: expect to see Fx60 on Fdroid. https://forum.f-droid.org/t/making-it-easier-for-f-droid-to-package-mozilla-firefox/1649/14 https://forum.f-droid.org/t/making-it-easier-for-f-droid-to-...

gdulli 9y ago

Did they fix the bug introduced with multi-process where select lists in their popped-up state don't respect css styles?

chmln 9y ago

Firefox gets raving feedback here, but for me it is unusably slow on a Linux machine. While websites do render fast, the UI is not very responsive, whether its laggy typing into the address bar [1] or the crawling devtools. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699

jcadam 9y ago
I switched back to Firefox for dev work on my system (Arch Linux), because Chrome would slow to a crawl with its devtools open. Firefox (since quantum) seems to fare better.
dxxvi 9y ago
I also use Arch and Firefox Beta daily at home. Don't see any issue.

szemet 9y ago

Can't find in the release notes: Is the Android version now based on quantum as the desktop version? As it was promised a few months back: https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/09/26/project-quantum-enhancements-wont-arrive-firefox-57-android/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/09/26/project-quantum-enh...

ac29 9y ago
One of the major Quantum improvements, Stylo, isn't coming to Android until Firefox 60: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366049 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366049 Unfortunately, it'll still be pretty slow until then.

superdaniel 9y ago

cmd+f,"u2f" or "webauth" Nothing.. I wonder when they'll ever get to fully supporting u2f (probably via webauth) so I don't have to use Chrome to log into certain websites.

cpeterso 9y ago
Mozilla will ship the Webauthn API in Firefox 60 (May 9): https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/using-hardware-token-based-2fa-with-the-webauthn-api/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/using-hardware-token-based...

Grollicus 9y ago

Can someone tell me what's behind "Faster load times for content on the Firefox Home page"?

ams6110 9y ago

I use Firefox Focus on my phone (android). Anyone know if it tracks the full Firefox releases or is it something completely separate?

Sylos 9y ago
It's completely separate. As in, it doesn't even use Gecko, it uses the native web engine of iOS/Android, so that's WebKit / Android Webview. With how many trackers and ads they block in Focus by default, they wouldn't exactly motivate webpage owners to support Gecko anyways, if they'd use Gecko in it. This is the current release notes of Firefox Focus on Android: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/whats-new-focus-android-4 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/whats-new-focus-android...

MrBuddyCasino 9y ago

Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP) for Mac users is some good stuff. FF is now noticeably smoother. Nice!

esturk 9y ago

Does anyone know why Alt+D doesn't focus into the Address Bar anymore? (I thought the behavior was suppose to be like Ctrl+L) I'm on Linux.