17 ms·

Firefox 62.0 Released

315 points by l2dy 8y ago

vmsp 8y ago
I really want to change to Firefox but a while ago it was a huge battery drain on my mac. It had something to do with it not using CoreAnimation, I think. Does anyone know if this is still the case?
- duhi88 8y ago
  I think everyone sees different results based on their hardware and browsing habits. I haven't seen anything recent directly comparing Firefox/Chrome/Safari on Mac to Firefox/Chrome/Edge on PC using the same exact websites. For me, it isn't always in the "Using significant power" list.
- fbender 8y ago
  Do you use a Retina display by chance? In certain setups, Fx is known to use more energy in HiDPI mode. Try disabling it and see if it fixes your issue. To what I know, this issue is known to Moz and will be fixed in a few versions (it appears to be a complex issue that takes time to solve).
  - toyg 8y ago
    > In certain setups, Fx is known to use more energy in HiDPI mode. Try disabling it "Hey, your laptop is too good, please cripple it!" is not a good answer, especially considering retina displays have been out for 6 years now (and I bet loads of Moz employees use them too). I use Firefox almost exclusively, and still I wonder, sometimes, what the %$#%@ the "leadership" is thinking. They keep messing with crap like Pocket instead of concentrating on fundamentals like these.
    - fbender 8y ago
      I was merely pointing out troubleshooting steps, not suggesting you take that as a solution to the issue. As I said, it‘s been worked on and latest nightly seems to improve that situation a bit.
  - danielhlockard 8y ago
    Pst, Moz and Mozilla are not the same thing.
- callinyouin 8y ago
  I've been using FF on my 2015 MBP as my daily driver for at least 2 years and haven't had any problems. I mean, it's a battery hog for sure, but no more so than Chrome or any other modern browser with dozens of tabs open. Every once in a rare while flash will cause CPU usage to spike like crazy, but that isn't much of a problem anymore for obvious reasons. YMMV though I guess, it seems like a lot of people are still having performance issues, probably depending on which extensions are in use. Not sure on the use of CoreAnimation.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    What do you mean by daily driver?
    - bhrgunatha 8y ago
      It usually means the main, default or preferred application.
- i80and 8y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824 Solved in Nightly for me!
Flimm 8y ago
This is the feature I'm most excited about this time: > “Reopen in Container” tab menu option appears for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container This is going to make containers even more useful.
- smnrchrds 8y ago
  If you are using containers, New container tab [0] and Switch Container [1] were essential add-ons. Now with this feature built-in, the latter is unnecessary. [0] Add Alt+C shortcut to open a new tab in current container: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container... [1] Reopen current tab in container: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-contai...
  - skykooler 8y ago
    Now all we need is something to let us map shortcuts to open specific containers, e.g. alt+s to open a new tab in the shopping container. (I tried using Application Shortcuts on OSX, but a. they stop working after restarting Firefox and b. they don't work if a tab has full screen video because that hides Firefox's menu bar on all monitors.)
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Been waiting for “Reopen in Container” for awhile. It's very annoying when I Ctrl+T to open a new tab for a site and it takes me awhile to realize I forgot to open it in the right container tab. Glad to see the feature finally added!
- QasimK 8y ago
  Also a huge fan of this feature, I lit up when I read it. I hope there is a way to turn it into a keyboard shortcut.
Aardwolf 8y ago
"Firefox Home (the default New Tab) now allows users to display up to 4 rows of top sites, Pocket stories, and highlights" Yay, I always wanted to see more spam in it! (had the "fun" experience of needing to figure out again how to disable new spammy things from new tab page on mobile despite having already done so before)
- nine_k 8y ago
  "Highlights" is not "spam", it's pages you willingly opened and browsed through for long enough. or something. It's not useless if you're prone to rummaging through recent history trying to find that site you looked at 4 hours ago and closed, but want to find and reopen now. I wish I better understood the criteria to highlight, though.
  - Aardwolf 8y ago
    Are you sure? Here is what "recommended by pocket", which automatically appeared recently, shows for me [edit: this is non-personalized as mentioned in a comment]: "buzzfeednews: Teachers are moonlighting as instagram influencers to make ends meet" trending "vox: a history of happiness explains why capitalism makes us feel empty inside" trending "theguardian: chanel shoes, but no salary: how one woman exposed the scandal of the french fashion industry" trending I have never visited those pages before. I had clean new tab pages showing only most commonly visited pages before, and suddenly automatically this stuff appeared in it now. I consider this spam, yes. Also, for most commonly visited pages, all it gives me is an orange square with only an "R" in it for reddit or a green square with an "N" in it for hacker news, but for the spammy stuff above it gives full titles!
    - nine_k 8y ago
      "Recommended by Pocket" is not "Highlights". Yes, I do disable the "recommended" stuff. When I enable "Highlights" on the new tab page, I see pages I spent a lot of time on lately: e.g. OpenWRT recommended hardware page, Coney Island water temperature page, and a page about the Graphwiz format. None of them are related to anything in Pocket (which I also actively use), or, thank goodness, buzzfeed.
caiob 8y ago
> Added Canadian English (en-CA) locale Not bad, Eh?!
- ianbicking 8y ago
  Some thorough translator finished translating all the strings for a project of mine into en-CA, which triggered the build error for having two exactly identical files in the tree (since en-CA was entirely identical to en-US). Nothing is free! This is why we can't have useless things!
  - eberkund 8y ago
    Some words are different though, for example armor vs armour. Although that should be similar to en-gb.
  - escherplex 8y ago
    Yes but don't you think it's skookum (BC) and aboot time for Newfie-speak to be recognized, eh? But after awhile multiple locale files do appear more like vanity metrics in apps like LibreOffice, with 18 possible English locale settings. Even the OED simply incorporates regional variations in its inventory so the need for redundancy does seem questionable. And in spell checking or grammar, illustration of possible regional variations may be useful to authors. EG, a Brit writes to a Yank 'I am going to shop', with 'shop' treated as a noun. But to the Yank 'to shop' would be an infinitive so a grammar check could point out that ambiguity.
bhauer 8y ago
When are containers going to graduate to a built-in feature rather than an extension?
- Iem3ohvi 8y ago
  All the heavy lifting for containers is built-in. It's just the mapping of tabs to containers, the creation/disposal of containers and UI parts that's managed through the extensions because users do have different preferences and use-cases in that area. E.g. they may want automatic rule-driven assignment of domains to containers except when either blah blah holds or when manually overridden. The built-in minimal and completely manual UI can be enabled with privacy.userContext.enabled = true
- gsa 8y ago
  Containers used to be the other way around, baked into Firefox and then moved to an extension last year. It's better that a power user feature is not a part of the default installation.
  - davnicwil 8y ago
    Containers are the killer feature of Firefox over Chrome and the reason I recommend it to family and friends. In my opinion they're not a power user feature at all, everyone and anyone can get instant obvious benefit from them. Multiple logins on the same service, controlling how you are tracked, just to name a couple. Attention and effort are expensive and 'install and just use' gets you a material percentage more users than 'install and then click through this menu system and install something else'. Containers should absolutely work out the box.
- billysielu 8y ago
  You can turn it on, it's called First Party Isolation.
- briffle 8y ago
  I would love a way to sync my sites defined in containers, so that site A opens in the correct container on all my computers running firefox. I would really love tabgroups to magically start working again, but I have been making due with containers. (and it does have some nice features)
bratao 8y ago
I'm a die-hard Firefox fan. While all my colleagues develop in Chrome, I'm the weird one who uses Firefox and always catches some problem in rendering when testing. But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use case.
- stepik777 8y ago
  I'm also using Windows 10, 4K monitor, Firefox and GTX 1060 and have no issues. So your issue might not actually be related to resolution.
- christophilus 8y ago
  ++ This was my experience, too, running FF on an older Mac (2014, I think) with a big retina screen.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jayflux 8y ago
  Could you file a bug report?
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I recently switched back from Chrome to FF and I'm running in 4K under Ubuntu. Same graphics card as you (or Intel integrated graphics). No performance issues to report.
- kosinus 8y ago
  I thought this was maybe just a Mac-specific issue, but apparently not! Chrome and Safari are fine, but Firefox is horridly slow. I'm kinda hoping more Quantum / Webrender stuff will fix things in the future.
- alexott 8y ago
  I have performance issues on Mac OS when it wakeups and attached to external monitor. Some tabs start to eat memory and CPU, until I kill process... it look like very old issue with scaling but it's not fixed
nine_k 8y ago
Not related to this particular release, but I wish Mozilla implemented tree-style tabs as core feature (or at least provided core API). The current "Tree style tab" plugin in indispensable for me, but has to be a hack, however exquisite, especially around tab context menus.
- mkaziz 8y ago
  Whoa I am trying this now and it looks amazing!!
  - nine_k 8y ago
    It is amazing, and is a huge productivity boost for me. It has a few irritating quirks, though, and I suppose these quirks have little chance to be removed without some support from browser core.
- baby 8y ago
  I'm still baffled at the number of people who have no idea that tree style tabs exist. If more education was given to people about this plugin, it would probably be a core feature of Firefox.
  - tibu 8y ago
    I have to check this out now. I'm one of those who haven't heard about tree style tabs until now
- jplayer01 8y ago
  This is the primary reason why I'm able to use FF. Tree style tabs make a huge quality of life difference
- psteinweber 8y ago
  Agreed, and I'm confident to say that every power user would benefit from vertical tabs. After all you can still read the title text when having more than 10 tabs open. I'm experiencing the retina macbook performance issue, hence I can't use FF + tree style tabs anymore, which was frustrating. Until I recently discovered the Vivaldi Browser (https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/) which has it as a native option - plus it's built on Chromium. Most Chrome extensions work. Good setup for me so far!
phakding 8y ago
With all these posters complaining, am I the only one who is totally satisfied with Firefox? I never had many issues using firefox. I did use Chrome briefly, but came back to firefox. If it matters, I mostly use firefox on Debian Linux and am also not a web developer.
- dcd0101 8y ago
  I used Chrome exclusively for a very long time. I’ve since moved back to FF and have been much happier with it.
- coffeefirst 8y ago
  I keep trying to switch. The thing that stops me is it chokes on big single page apps. Arguably the problem is the sites being choked on (too much javascript) but there's not much I can do about that.
  - phakding 8y ago
    What would be an example of a "big single page app"?
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      Can’t speak for OP, but Slack is the first that comes to mind.
      - robotron 8y ago
        I have Slack open all day in Firefox and it's fine. Much better than the desktop app for me.
    - driverdan 8y ago
      Google Calendar crushes FF for me. I can't leave it open very long or it slows down FF, eats CPU cycles, and drains my battery.
nathcd 8y ago
> Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html or json files, as they will be removed in a future release. Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features. I don't think these are the features being referred to when people complain about "browser bloat", Mozilla. I expect Chrome to push me to use remote services, but I don't want that from Mozilla. I know it's a trope to complain about Firefox becoming a Chrome clone, but it feels truer every release.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  They're also paring down user-facing settings. It makes no sense to, e.g., send people to about:config for disabling web service workers.
  - driverdan 8y ago
    They've been actively hostile to friendly user settings for years. They constantly reduce what's exposed through the settings page, forcing users into about:config.
    - snaky 8y ago
      Forcing users to default settings actually, they would happily remove about:config if they could.
    - Adverblessly 8y ago
      And I feel like that's the first step towards using their telemetry to decide that feature is unused and can be deprecated (because only the people who really care about something will go through with Googling to find whatever hidden setting needs to be changed to fix their browser). And yes, I'm still salty about no longer being able to set showOneOffButtons to false :) (I've stopped using FireFox since the new extensions model doesn't allow this misfeature to be fixed with extensions anymore)
- 8y ago
portaljacker 8y ago
Why remove descriptions from bookmarks? I know they're not the most useful thing, but I don't get the benefit of removing them.
- toyg 8y ago
  I suspect it's simply "one less thing to worry about when we sync with the cloud".
- yborg 8y ago
  I suspect the long game here is eliminating user bookmarking altogether. Why would you want to use something as archaic as a saved URL, when there's a service that knows where you want to go to on the Internet better than you could ever decide for yourself?
- ptx 8y ago
  They spent lots of money on Pocket and are increasingly pushing people to use it. Making the built-in bookmarks worse is an easy way to make Pocket look better by comparison.
bovine3dom 8y ago
Coinciding with this release, Firefox 52 ESR is no longer supported, so no supported versions of Firefox support the legacy extensions. I'm mentioning this here just so I can tell Vimperator / Pentadactyl / VimFx users that there are loads of options you can replace your old extensions with, some of which are... okay. Links follow in increasing order of user-friendliness: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl [^] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_f... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ [^] Disclaimer: I develop this one. If you've tried it before in the past, now might be a good time to try it again. We've just pushed out a release that moved quite a lot of code around, hopefully eliminating a whole class of bugs, especially relating to ignore mode and multiple windows.
- gkya 8y ago
  Have you considered Pale Moon? Do you thing it's usable/dependable?
  - bovine3dom 8y ago
    I actually keep it installed because it's the easiest way of using Pentadactyl; I use it to compare behaviour with Tridactyl (e.g, looking for prior art for what a bind should be). As such I literally run it side by side with new Firefox. Honestly, it's just kind of slow. Mozilla have done a fantastic job in the last few years.
    - gkya 8y ago
      Thanks!
    - pard68 8y ago
      Have you tried Waterfox? I find it to be as good as FF 52
JimminyCrocket 8y ago
Youtube on Firefox for me is awful. I get constant buffering on 1080p+ content. Chrome is flawless. I have the same extensions on both browsers, curious if anyone else has experienced the same recently?
- toyg 8y ago
  YT recently got choppier for me too, but I put it down to the layout changes rather than FF.
- mrspeaker 8y ago
  Yes, I notice this on my mac (mac book pro, 2015?): I'll even often open Safari just to watch youtube videos. It's fine on my Linux machine (X1 Yoga thinkpad) though.
- dartf 8y ago
  It was discussed some time ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 TLDR: YouTube uses some obsolete technologies that aren't supported in non webkit browsers.
- aidenn0 8y ago
  There was an article on HN about this recently. I'm on phone so can't search easily, but something about it using a polyfill for a chrome specific feature. There was a way to get the old behavior in the article I think.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    You install the "YouTube Classic" Firefox extension to force YouTube to use its old (non-Polymer) layout. This extension won't help with video buffering issues, however. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-classic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...
- driverdan 8y ago
  Are you running an old version of FF? I used to have issues with YT about two years ago but they made fixes and it has been fine since then. I watch a lot of YT content through FF and it has worked fine on both Windows and MacOS / OS X for a long time.
phkahler 8y ago
>> Improved graphics rendering for Windows users without accelerated hardware using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware?!?!?! And yet Wayland support is still not up to snuff. I use Firefox almost exclusively, but Mozilla seems to have some strange priorities. It's not just them, it's a lot of people out there doing what they want instead of what's good for their users.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  > Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware? Two words: Remote Desktop.
- aidenn0 8y ago
  Some buggy graphics drivers make accelerated rendering a bad idea (mostly older cards, but also often the first few revisions of the driver for a new Intel gpu). I don't know if FF does, but chrome used to maintain a blacklist of GPUs to disable hardware rendering
- muizelaar 8y ago
  From https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/ https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/: Linux users are about 2.7% of Firefox users Windows users are 93.2% of Firefox users 27.7% of Windows users don't have Direct2D That means 25.8% of users "run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware". So it's entirely reasonable to prioritize these 25.8% of users over the 2.7% on Linux.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    How many Linux users disable telemetry collection vs windows users (who are most certainly used to spewing telemetry to external parties)? I definitely disable it on all of my (Linux) systems where I run Firefox. I suspect I am not alone.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      > How many Linux users disable telemetry collection Almost certainly a very small number.
QasimK 8y ago
I really love Firefox, and I’m still holding out for HiDPI support on Wayland. Currently it is a little awful to use...
Endy 8y ago
With each new Firefox release, it gets farther and farther away from what the browser once was. I started using Firefox over a decade ago, now it's become just a different version of awful. I don't know exactly happened when Mozilla lost their perspective, but I do know when - the first introduction of Australis. And they should have figured out, when you name it after something upside-down, you should seriously wonder if it's upside down. WebExtensions is just piling error upon error. And with each new release, more control is taken from the user, more decent features are removed. I swear, Firefox peaked at 4.0.
- mook 8y ago
  I think it really went downhill earlier than that; somewhere around 4 was when they stopped trying to work with the ecosystem and just started blocking things instead. Perhaps I've accidentally got rose-tinted glasses on though…
andy_ppp 8y ago
Is Pocket the only bookmarking service available? Seems a bit off that there is no public interface to this and the Mozilla seem to have some kind of agreement with Pocket?
- james_pm 8y ago
  https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
- cat199 8y ago
  not sure about addons, but builtin FF sync should work and also allows you to self host if desired last I checked
deforciant 8y ago
I really like Firefox but unfortunately it doesn't run well on my machine. I have Ryzen 2700X, geforce 1080 Ti, running current Ubuntu but firefox is using 1 full CPU at 100% (load is moving from one core to another) and constantly lags. Researched a lot for any similar problems but couldn't find any solution. Has anyone seen anything like this and maybe even solved it?
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Have you considered submitting a bug report? That's likely to get more attention than complaining on some random internet forum.
guilhas 8y ago
Firefox 55 working great, most extensions supported and containers working
- konart 8y ago
  Note that they will be removing legacy extensions from their store soon: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-legacy-firefox-add-ons-from-add-on-portal-in-early-october/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-re...
  - plopz 8y ago
    The sad thing is that there still isn't good replacements for the old addons and mozilla hasn't shown much progress in adding the needed apis to webextensions.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Instead of just marking the extensions incompatible with particular versions.
- gruez 8y ago
  >Firefox 55 working great meanwhile, all the security patches you're missing out on: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... at least use ESR 52, which is only 1 release cycle out of date as of today.
  - guilhas 8y ago
    That version does not support containers extension. It has only basic built in support. Firefox ESR has thousands of open bugs, and possible exploitable flaws. And I don't presume the current tip will be much better. I don't think the fixes you presented make much difference. Also a hacker more probably will attack tip and ESR. I'll faster go to Palemoon than returning to Firefox in the near future.
exodust 8y ago
If the status bar is still missing, I'm not interested in Firefox 62. They should never have taken that option away in their pathetic "make it look like Chrome" weakness of product strategy.
clumsysmurf 8y ago
One thing I still miss from Safari is 'Show all Tabs' which would give you thumbnails of open tabs. There is nothing built into FireFox that is equivalent. I have looked at some of the extensions, and they are in various states of support or waiting for FF to implement some API. The dropdown menu showing the tab titles becomes pretty useless after a certain number has been reached. I'm amazed in 2018 it seems tab management (> 20 tabs) is still so awful.
sslalready 8y ago
Is it just me or does the HSTS preload list not work in Firefox 62 (macOS 10.12)? I see a plaintext HTTP request when opening http://www.google.com http://www.google.com instead of an immediate https connection to www.google.com.
fiatjaf 8y ago
My take on how Firefox is better than Chrome: https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-chrome.txt https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-chrome.txt (No politics, just the raw browser features. Also, I'm a long time Chrome user, switched to Firefox an year ago, then back to Chrome for a week and now permanently on Firefox.)
darn 8y ago
There is no non hacky way to make chrome not close window when you close the last tab. That's enough for me to drop it as my main browser. That's like literally the only thing I look for in a browser

315 points by l2dy 8y ago

vmsp 8y ago

I really want to change to Firefox but a while ago it was a huge battery drain on my mac. It had something to do with it not using CoreAnimation, I think. Does anyone know if this is still the case?

duhi88 8y ago
I think everyone sees different results based on their hardware and browsing habits. I haven't seen anything recent directly comparing Firefox/Chrome/Safari on Mac to Firefox/Chrome/Edge on PC using the same exact websites. For me, it isn't always in the "Using significant power" list.
fbender 8y ago
Do you use a Retina display by chance? In certain setups, Fx is known to use more energy in HiDPI mode. Try disabling it and see if it fixes your issue. To what I know, this issue is known to Moz and will be fixed in a few versions (it appears to be a complex issue that takes time to solve).
- toyg 8y ago
  > In certain setups, Fx is known to use more energy in HiDPI mode. Try disabling it "Hey, your laptop is too good, please cripple it!" is not a good answer, especially considering retina displays have been out for 6 years now (and I bet loads of Moz employees use them too). I use Firefox almost exclusively, and still I wonder, sometimes, what the %$#%@ the "leadership" is thinking. They keep messing with crap like Pocket instead of concentrating on fundamentals like these.
  - fbender 8y ago
    I was merely pointing out troubleshooting steps, not suggesting you take that as a solution to the issue. As I said, it‘s been worked on and latest nightly seems to improve that situation a bit.
- danielhlockard 8y ago
  Pst, Moz and Mozilla are not the same thing.
callinyouin 8y ago
I've been using FF on my 2015 MBP as my daily driver for at least 2 years and haven't had any problems. I mean, it's a battery hog for sure, but no more so than Chrome or any other modern browser with dozens of tabs open. Every once in a rare while flash will cause CPU usage to spike like crazy, but that isn't much of a problem anymore for obvious reasons. YMMV though I guess, it seems like a lot of people are still having performance issues, probably depending on which extensions are in use. Not sure on the use of CoreAnimation.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  What do you mean by daily driver?
  - bhrgunatha 8y ago
    It usually means the main, default or preferred application.
i80and 8y ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824 Solved in Nightly for me!

Flimm 8y ago

This is the feature I'm most excited about this time: > “Reopen in Container” tab menu option appears for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container This is going to make containers even more useful.

smnrchrds 8y ago
If you are using containers, New container tab [0] and Switch Container [1] were essential add-ons. Now with this feature built-in, the latter is unnecessary. [0] Add Alt+C shortcut to open a new tab in current container: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container... [1] Reopen current tab in container: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-contai...
- skykooler 8y ago
  Now all we need is something to let us map shortcuts to open specific containers, e.g. alt+s to open a new tab in the shopping container. (I tried using Application Shortcuts on OSX, but a. they stop working after restarting Firefox and b. they don't work if a tab has full screen video because that hides Firefox's menu bar on all monitors.)

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

Been waiting for “Reopen in Container” for awhile. It's very annoying when I Ctrl+T to open a new tab for a site and it takes me awhile to realize I forgot to open it in the right container tab. Glad to see the feature finally added!

QasimK 8y ago
Also a huge fan of this feature, I lit up when I read it. I hope there is a way to turn it into a keyboard shortcut.

Aardwolf 8y ago

"Firefox Home (the default New Tab) now allows users to display up to 4 rows of top sites, Pocket stories, and highlights" Yay, I always wanted to see more spam in it! (had the "fun" experience of needing to figure out again how to disable new spammy things from new tab page on mobile despite having already done so before)

nine_k 8y ago
"Highlights" is not "spam", it's pages you willingly opened and browsed through for long enough. or something. It's not useless if you're prone to rummaging through recent history trying to find that site you looked at 4 hours ago and closed, but want to find and reopen now. I wish I better understood the criteria to highlight, though.
- Aardwolf 8y ago
  Are you sure? Here is what "recommended by pocket", which automatically appeared recently, shows for me [edit: this is non-personalized as mentioned in a comment]: "buzzfeednews: Teachers are moonlighting as instagram influencers to make ends meet" trending "vox: a history of happiness explains why capitalism makes us feel empty inside" trending "theguardian: chanel shoes, but no salary: how one woman exposed the scandal of the french fashion industry" trending I have never visited those pages before. I had clean new tab pages showing only most commonly visited pages before, and suddenly automatically this stuff appeared in it now. I consider this spam, yes. Also, for most commonly visited pages, all it gives me is an orange square with only an "R" in it for reddit or a green square with an "N" in it for hacker news, but for the spammy stuff above it gives full titles!
  - nine_k 8y ago
    "Recommended by Pocket" is not "Highlights". Yes, I do disable the "recommended" stuff. When I enable "Highlights" on the new tab page, I see pages I spent a lot of time on lately: e.g. OpenWRT recommended hardware page, Coney Island water temperature page, and a page about the Graphwiz format. None of them are related to anything in Pocket (which I also actively use), or, thank goodness, buzzfeed.

caiob 8y ago

> Added Canadian English (en-CA) locale Not bad, Eh?!

ianbicking 8y ago
Some thorough translator finished translating all the strings for a project of mine into en-CA, which triggered the build error for having two exactly identical files in the tree (since en-CA was entirely identical to en-US). Nothing is free! This is why we can't have useless things!
- eberkund 8y ago
  Some words are different though, for example armor vs armour. Although that should be similar to en-gb.
- escherplex 8y ago
  Yes but don't you think it's skookum (BC) and aboot time for Newfie-speak to be recognized, eh? But after awhile multiple locale files do appear more like vanity metrics in apps like LibreOffice, with 18 possible English locale settings. Even the OED simply incorporates regional variations in its inventory so the need for redundancy does seem questionable. And in spell checking or grammar, illustration of possible regional variations may be useful to authors. EG, a Brit writes to a Yank 'I am going to shop', with 'shop' treated as a noun. But to the Yank 'to shop' would be an infinitive so a grammar check could point out that ambiguity.

bhauer 8y ago

When are containers going to graduate to a built-in feature rather than an extension?

Iem3ohvi 8y ago
All the heavy lifting for containers is built-in. It's just the mapping of tabs to containers, the creation/disposal of containers and UI parts that's managed through the extensions because users do have different preferences and use-cases in that area. E.g. they may want automatic rule-driven assignment of domains to containers except when either blah blah holds or when manually overridden. The built-in minimal and completely manual UI can be enabled with privacy.userContext.enabled = true
gsa 8y ago
Containers used to be the other way around, baked into Firefox and then moved to an extension last year. It's better that a power user feature is not a part of the default installation.
- davnicwil 8y ago
  Containers are the killer feature of Firefox over Chrome and the reason I recommend it to family and friends. In my opinion they're not a power user feature at all, everyone and anyone can get instant obvious benefit from them. Multiple logins on the same service, controlling how you are tracked, just to name a couple. Attention and effort are expensive and 'install and just use' gets you a material percentage more users than 'install and then click through this menu system and install something else'. Containers should absolutely work out the box.
billysielu 8y ago
You can turn it on, it's called First Party Isolation.
briffle 8y ago
I would love a way to sync my sites defined in containers, so that site A opens in the correct container on all my computers running firefox. I would really love tabgroups to magically start working again, but I have been making due with containers. (and it does have some nice features)

bratao 8y ago

I'm a die-hard Firefox fan. While all my colleagues develop in Chrome, I'm the weird one who uses Firefox and always catches some problem in rendering when testing. But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use case.

stepik777 8y ago
I'm also using Windows 10, 4K monitor, Firefox and GTX 1060 and have no issues. So your issue might not actually be related to resolution.
christophilus 8y ago
++ This was my experience, too, running FF on an older Mac (2014, I think) with a big retina screen.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jayflux 8y ago
Could you file a bug report?
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I recently switched back from Chrome to FF and I'm running in 4K under Ubuntu. Same graphics card as you (or Intel integrated graphics). No performance issues to report.
kosinus 8y ago
I thought this was maybe just a Mac-specific issue, but apparently not! Chrome and Safari are fine, but Firefox is horridly slow. I'm kinda hoping more Quantum / Webrender stuff will fix things in the future.
alexott 8y ago
I have performance issues on Mac OS when it wakeups and attached to external monitor. Some tabs start to eat memory and CPU, until I kill process... it look like very old issue with scaling but it's not fixed

nine_k 8y ago

Not related to this particular release, but I wish Mozilla implemented tree-style tabs as core feature (or at least provided core API). The current "Tree style tab" plugin in indispensable for me, but has to be a hack, however exquisite, especially around tab context menus.

mkaziz 8y ago
Whoa I am trying this now and it looks amazing!!
- nine_k 8y ago
  It is amazing, and is a huge productivity boost for me. It has a few irritating quirks, though, and I suppose these quirks have little chance to be removed without some support from browser core.
baby 8y ago
I'm still baffled at the number of people who have no idea that tree style tabs exist. If more education was given to people about this plugin, it would probably be a core feature of Firefox.
- tibu 8y ago
  I have to check this out now. I'm one of those who haven't heard about tree style tabs until now
jplayer01 8y ago
This is the primary reason why I'm able to use FF. Tree style tabs make a huge quality of life difference
psteinweber 8y ago
Agreed, and I'm confident to say that every power user would benefit from vertical tabs. After all you can still read the title text when having more than 10 tabs open. I'm experiencing the retina macbook performance issue, hence I can't use FF + tree style tabs anymore, which was frustrating. Until I recently discovered the Vivaldi Browser (https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/) which has it as a native option - plus it's built on Chromium. Most Chrome extensions work. Good setup for me so far!

phakding 8y ago

With all these posters complaining, am I the only one who is totally satisfied with Firefox? I never had many issues using firefox. I did use Chrome briefly, but came back to firefox. If it matters, I mostly use firefox on Debian Linux and am also not a web developer.

dcd0101 8y ago
I used Chrome exclusively for a very long time. I’ve since moved back to FF and have been much happier with it.
coffeefirst 8y ago
I keep trying to switch. The thing that stops me is it chokes on big single page apps. Arguably the problem is the sites being choked on (too much javascript) but there's not much I can do about that.
- phakding 8y ago
  What would be an example of a "big single page app"?
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Can’t speak for OP, but Slack is the first that comes to mind.
    - robotron 8y ago
      I have Slack open all day in Firefox and it's fine. Much better than the desktop app for me.
  - driverdan 8y ago
    Google Calendar crushes FF for me. I can't leave it open very long or it slows down FF, eats CPU cycles, and drains my battery.

nathcd 8y ago

> Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html or json files, as they will be removed in a future release. Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features. I don't think these are the features being referred to when people complain about "browser bloat", Mozilla. I expect Chrome to push me to use remote services, but I don't want that from Mozilla. I know it's a trope to complain about Firefox becoming a Chrome clone, but it feels truer every release.

nerdponx 8y ago
They're also paring down user-facing settings. It makes no sense to, e.g., send people to about:config for disabling web service workers.
- driverdan 8y ago
  They've been actively hostile to friendly user settings for years. They constantly reduce what's exposed through the settings page, forcing users into about:config.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Forcing users to default settings actually, they would happily remove about:config if they could.
  - Adverblessly 8y ago
    And I feel like that's the first step towards using their telemetry to decide that feature is unused and can be deprecated (because only the people who really care about something will go through with Googling to find whatever hidden setting needs to be changed to fix their browser). And yes, I'm still salty about no longer being able to set showOneOffButtons to false :) (I've stopped using FireFox since the new extensions model doesn't allow this misfeature to be fixed with extensions anymore)
8y ago

portaljacker 8y ago

Why remove descriptions from bookmarks? I know they're not the most useful thing, but I don't get the benefit of removing them.

toyg 8y ago
I suspect it's simply "one less thing to worry about when we sync with the cloud".
yborg 8y ago
I suspect the long game here is eliminating user bookmarking altogether. Why would you want to use something as archaic as a saved URL, when there's a service that knows where you want to go to on the Internet better than you could ever decide for yourself?
ptx 8y ago
They spent lots of money on Pocket and are increasingly pushing people to use it. Making the built-in bookmarks worse is an easy way to make Pocket look better by comparison.

bovine3dom 8y ago

Coinciding with this release, Firefox 52 ESR is no longer supported, so no supported versions of Firefox support the legacy extensions. I'm mentioning this here just so I can tell Vimperator / Pentadactyl / VimFx users that there are loads of options you can replace your old extensions with, some of which are... okay. Links follow in increasing order of user-friendliness: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl [^] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_f... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ [^] Disclaimer: I develop this one. If you've tried it before in the past, now might be a good time to try it again. We've just pushed out a release that moved quite a lot of code around, hopefully eliminating a whole class of bugs, especially relating to ignore mode and multiple windows.

gkya 8y ago
Have you considered Pale Moon? Do you thing it's usable/dependable?
- bovine3dom 8y ago
  I actually keep it installed because it's the easiest way of using Pentadactyl; I use it to compare behaviour with Tridactyl (e.g, looking for prior art for what a bind should be). As such I literally run it side by side with new Firefox. Honestly, it's just kind of slow. Mozilla have done a fantastic job in the last few years.
  - gkya 8y ago
    Thanks!
  - pard68 8y ago
    Have you tried Waterfox? I find it to be as good as FF 52

JimminyCrocket 8y ago

Youtube on Firefox for me is awful. I get constant buffering on 1080p+ content. Chrome is flawless. I have the same extensions on both browsers, curious if anyone else has experienced the same recently?

toyg 8y ago
YT recently got choppier for me too, but I put it down to the layout changes rather than FF.
mrspeaker 8y ago
Yes, I notice this on my mac (mac book pro, 2015?): I'll even often open Safari just to watch youtube videos. It's fine on my Linux machine (X1 Yoga thinkpad) though.
dartf 8y ago
It was discussed some time ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 TLDR: YouTube uses some obsolete technologies that aren't supported in non webkit browsers.
aidenn0 8y ago
There was an article on HN about this recently. I'm on phone so can't search easily, but something about it using a polyfill for a chrome specific feature. There was a way to get the old behavior in the article I think.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  You install the "YouTube Classic" Firefox extension to force YouTube to use its old (non-Polymer) layout. This extension won't help with video buffering issues, however. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-classic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...
driverdan 8y ago
Are you running an old version of FF? I used to have issues with YT about two years ago but they made fixes and it has been fine since then. I watch a lot of YT content through FF and it has worked fine on both Windows and MacOS / OS X for a long time.

phkahler 8y ago

>> Improved graphics rendering for Windows users without accelerated hardware using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware?!?!?! And yet Wayland support is still not up to snuff. I use Firefox almost exclusively, but Mozilla seems to have some strange priorities. It's not just them, it's a lot of people out there doing what they want instead of what's good for their users.

duskwuff 8y ago
> Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware? Two words: Remote Desktop.
aidenn0 8y ago
Some buggy graphics drivers make accelerated rendering a bad idea (mostly older cards, but also often the first few revisions of the driver for a new Intel gpu). I don't know if FF does, but chrome used to maintain a blacklist of GPUs to disable hardware rendering
muizelaar 8y ago
From https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/ https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/: Linux users are about 2.7% of Firefox users Windows users are 93.2% of Firefox users 27.7% of Windows users don't have Direct2D That means 25.8% of users "run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware". So it's entirely reasonable to prioritize these 25.8% of users over the 2.7% on Linux.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  How many Linux users disable telemetry collection vs windows users (who are most certainly used to spewing telemetry to external parties)? I definitely disable it on all of my (Linux) systems where I run Firefox. I suspect I am not alone.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    > How many Linux users disable telemetry collection Almost certainly a very small number.

QasimK 8y ago

I really love Firefox, and I’m still holding out for HiDPI support on Wayland. Currently it is a little awful to use...

Endy 8y ago

With each new Firefox release, it gets farther and farther away from what the browser once was. I started using Firefox over a decade ago, now it's become just a different version of awful. I don't know exactly happened when Mozilla lost their perspective, but I do know when - the first introduction of Australis. And they should have figured out, when you name it after something upside-down, you should seriously wonder if it's upside down. WebExtensions is just piling error upon error. And with each new release, more control is taken from the user, more decent features are removed. I swear, Firefox peaked at 4.0.

mook 8y ago
I think it really went downhill earlier than that; somewhere around 4 was when they stopped trying to work with the ecosystem and just started blocking things instead. Perhaps I've accidentally got rose-tinted glasses on though…

andy_ppp 8y ago

Is Pocket the only bookmarking service available? Seems a bit off that there is no public interface to this and the Mozilla seem to have some kind of agreement with Pocket?

james_pm 8y ago
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
cat199 8y ago
not sure about addons, but builtin FF sync should work and also allows you to self host if desired last I checked

deforciant 8y ago

I really like Firefox but unfortunately it doesn't run well on my machine. I have Ryzen 2700X, geforce 1080 Ti, running current Ubuntu but firefox is using 1 full CPU at 100% (load is moving from one core to another) and constantly lags. Researched a lot for any similar problems but couldn't find any solution. Has anyone seen anything like this and maybe even solved it?

craftyguy 8y ago
Have you considered submitting a bug report? That's likely to get more attention than complaining on some random internet forum.

guilhas 8y ago

Firefox 55 working great, most extensions supported and containers working

konart 8y ago
Note that they will be removing legacy extensions from their store soon: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-legacy-firefox-add-ons-from-add-on-portal-in-early-october/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-re...
- plopz 8y ago
  The sad thing is that there still isn't good replacements for the old addons and mozilla hasn't shown much progress in adding the needed apis to webextensions.
- snaky 8y ago
  Instead of just marking the extensions incompatible with particular versions.
gruez 8y ago
>Firefox 55 working great meanwhile, all the security patches you're missing out on: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... at least use ESR 52, which is only 1 release cycle out of date as of today.
- guilhas 8y ago
  That version does not support containers extension. It has only basic built in support. Firefox ESR has thousands of open bugs, and possible exploitable flaws. And I don't presume the current tip will be much better. I don't think the fixes you presented make much difference. Also a hacker more probably will attack tip and ESR. I'll faster go to Palemoon than returning to Firefox in the near future.

exodust 8y ago

If the status bar is still missing, I'm not interested in Firefox 62. They should never have taken that option away in their pathetic "make it look like Chrome" weakness of product strategy.

clumsysmurf 8y ago

One thing I still miss from Safari is 'Show all Tabs' which would give you thumbnails of open tabs. There is nothing built into FireFox that is equivalent. I have looked at some of the extensions, and they are in various states of support or waiting for FF to implement some API. The dropdown menu showing the tab titles becomes pretty useless after a certain number has been reached. I'm amazed in 2018 it seems tab management (> 20 tabs) is still so awful.

sslalready 8y ago

Is it just me or does the HSTS preload list not work in Firefox 62 (macOS 10.12)? I see a plaintext HTTP request when opening http://www.google.com http://www.google.com instead of an immediate https connection to www.google.com.

fiatjaf 8y ago

My take on how Firefox is better than Chrome: https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-chrome.txt https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-chrome.txt (No politics, just the raw browser features. Also, I'm a long time Chrome user, switched to Firefox an year ago, then back to Chrome for a week and now permanently on Firefox.)

darn 8y ago

There is no non hacky way to make chrome not close window when you close the last tab. That's enough for me to drop it as my main browser. That's like literally the only thing I look for in a browser