20 ms·

Firefox 65.0 released

724 points by theodorejb 8y ago

bjoli 8y ago
Does anyone know what the decoding performance of AV1 is these days? I'd love to play with it, but back when I last tried my oldish laptop did NOT like decoding it.
- leeoniya 8y ago
  dav1d is the state of the art currently, but i dont know if it's used by FF. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d
  - padenot 8y ago
    It is, however it's not enabled by default for now. It will be in a few releases after we figure about a couple issues with the build system.
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      For people that would like to follow along from home, here's the Firefox bug for switching to the dav1d decoder: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=dav1d https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=dav1d
- gardaani 8y ago
  I have tried AV1 video on Chrome and it seems to be using the same amount of CPU as VP9 on my computer. I can't test Firefox support for AV1 on my Mac, because it seems to work only on Windows.
  - ignaloidas 8y ago
    It's only on windows by default, but you can enable it using about:config flag media.av1.enabled
  - M2Ys4U 8y ago
    I've been running with AV1 enabled on Linux (via about:config) for a while - maybe flipping the pref will work for you?
oosjc9a5 8y ago
A question regarding the advertisements they show on the home page: https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-bookingcom-ad-in-the-new-tab-page/ https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-boo... Are these ads introduced with these updates, or does Firefox include a backdoor so the Mozilla Corporation can show whatever they want on your home page?
- NamTaf 8y ago
  In addition to this: Even though the link claims that it is not a paid placement, it's still an advertisement. If Mozilla really wants to provide more value to me, they'll tell me how to permanently disable it. Its presence provides negative value to me.
  - oosjc9a5 8y ago
    Of course they paid for it... Do you really think the Mozilla Corporation has sent an ad to millions of users for free? Whether that money went to the corporation or to the pocket of an executive, that's another matter.
    - NamTaf 8y ago
      Then the statement "It was not a paid placement or advertisement." is blatantly false. they simply say whether it was paid, not whether it was paid to a specific entity.
      - acdha 8y ago
        Read the statement more carefully: > This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent. It could be that they are knowingly making public statements which are untrue and will expose themselves to legal liability for that or it could be that the statement means exactly what it says and that Mozilla is experimenting with promotions for using Firefox which do not involve money changing hands, especially if they're just gauging interest to see whether people even click on those regions. The concert was definitely promoted as a “Thanks for using Firefox” deal so I would not be at all surprised to learn that Booking.com gave a modest discount as part of a deal where no money changed hands as per the statement.
sambe 8y ago
I feel like I've been waiting a long time for autoplay blocking - does this keep being pushed back or have I missed a feature cancellation/config setting/extension announcement?
- NamTaf 8y ago
  I was hoping to see this pushed out by default because I agree that it's the best 'new' feature I've found in the browser in some time. You can change it in about:config, searching for 'media.autoplay'. I've changed the following: 1) Set 'ask permission' to true 2) Set 'block webaudio' to true 3) Set default to 2, which is 'ask per domain'. As I understand, the default of 0 is 'autoplay', 1 is 'block' and 2 is 'ask' but your favourite search engine of choice can provide clarification on this and the other settings. 2 will cause a pop-up beside the URL bar, like with password save popups, letting you accept or block and with a checkbox to set it permanent.
  - vezycash 8y ago
    Why don't they write it as Block, Ask, Allow? Much easier this way.
    - andy_ppp 8y ago
      I’m sure pull requests or bug reports are welcome from Mozilla if you feel strongly about it.
    - NamTaf 8y ago
      Apparently, setting both “ask-permission” and “enabled.user-gestures-needed” to true then enables a setting in the privacy area of settings to have a dropdown box with these options. I’m guessing it maps to the 0/1/2 setting I mentioned earlier https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033
      - joveian 8y ago
        Thanks! I also found this page with a bit more info on the settings: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxMediaAutoplaySettingsII?showcomments https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxMediaAut... I changed all the media.autoplay settings from the default except block-event.enabled, with default set to 1. With that it seems to do what I want. I'm not sure if the strange media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground behavior described in the comment is still happening but I set that to false also.
darkpuma 8y ago
>Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart). To whoever is responsible for pushing this change through: Thank you.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Yes, it is much appreciated. Can't tell you how many times my finger has slipped and hit Ctrl+Q instead of Ctrl+W. Oh well! I didn't need all that work...
  - soft_dev_person 8y ago
    So you can't get it back? I usually use Chrome, I never lose my session no matter what I slip up to do.
    - soft_dev_person 8y ago
      Thanks for the downvote, whomever. I always consider switching to Firefox, as I think Chrome needs competition, but Firefox has just never been up to par in usability (especially developer usability) whenever I've tried to switch. Things like "losing your work" for no good reason (don't Firefox have "Re-open closed Window"?) is just another thing I would add to the list of reasons not to switch, so feel free to clarify.
      - detaro 8y ago
        To quote from the initial comment: > (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart). It also already has an optional check if you want to close a window ("you're closing a window with 10 tabs. sure?"), and a list of recently closed windows to restore.
        soft_dev_person 8y ago
        I interpreted the change as if it would always show the quit warning regardless of any settings, since the warning popup is not exactly a new feature. Some more context helped clarify.
pointillistic 8y ago
No changes to the interface again! Will not go back to FF till they take graphic design seriously.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  curious, what changes do you want to see?
  - pointillistic 8y ago
    Here are my comments. There is too much color in the tab and bookmarks bars. It should fade with focus on the content. The icons are too contrasting, the outlive around the folders is too harsh. I don't think they changed the icons design in 10 years or more. I find his lack of aesthetic attention jarring. Same goes for navigation and settings interface.
- 0xffff2 8y ago
  What changes do you want to see? There's so little chrome left in the browser these days that I'm not sure what there is to design besides the appearance of tabs, which is easily customizable.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  I'm also curious. What does Firefox do so much worse than Chrome, Safari, or IE? The interfaces of all four are more or less identical.
- detritus 8y ago
  As a someone who works in the design industry, I appreciate it when ‘graphic design’ takes a backseat where my browser is concerned and they just let the UI merge as discretely with the OS interface as possible... ...and from here, that's exactly what it appears to be doing!
olavgg 8y ago
I love Firefox and use it all the time, but for the last few years one of my biggest pains is the OSX performance on my Macbook Pro. Is this close to be resolved soon?
- minedwiz 8y ago
  It’s strange - I could have sworn that, for a while around where “quantum” was released, OS X performance was really quite good. I ditched it for chrome for a bit, and it even held up with my daily 20+ tabs.
- bluejekyll 8y ago
  What do you mean by performance? I’ve found Firefox to be generally faster than Safari and Chrome on my MacBook Pro. I generally find it to be more energy efficient than Chrome, but Safari is still king there. This is personal experience, no lab tests, etc.
- epage 8y ago
  I wonder if this is due to not using the native compositor which they are looking at fixing this year. See "Adding support for native OS compositors to WebRender" at https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html
- acdha 8y ago
  Are you using a non-native display resolution? That seems to be the common factor for people who have significant problems. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
  - amimetic 8y ago
    A scaled resolution is now default on most MacBooks. I haven't noticed battery problems but certainly seen RAM usage at least double that of Chrome and considerably above Safari.
    - 8y ago
numbsafari 8y ago
I wish Mozilla started to compete with Google on ChromeOS. Just make it the browser and leverage containers to keep things locked down. There’s a total business here and Mozilla could make it happen, without the entanglements of the ads business. Real missed opportunity to help promote open standards at the services level as well.
- vezycash 8y ago
  They had FirefoxOS remember? Doubt think they'll want to do it again soon.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    A relevant recent article: https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec32d94f0 https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec3...
  - tombert 8y ago
    I think the intended market for FirefoxOS was pretty different than ChromeOS. Wasn't FirefoxOS for low-powered phones? ChromeOS is designed around a "streamlined" laptop system.
    - Zhyl 8y ago
      Yeah, FFOS essentially had the SteamOS problem - targeting a market that didn't have any 'wedge' users in their existing demographics. For Firefox OS and Steam OS to take off you needed to buy new hardware and the people most on board with this already had hardware and didn't have a use case for buying more (low end phone for Firefox, PC-as-a-console for SteamOS). In either case there was a small pool of first movers and then almost no early adopters. This was pretty stark in the steam case as Linux usage, sales and games rose considerably but hardware sales were pretty thin.
      - numbsafari 8y ago
        Schools. Schools would be pretty motivated to drop Google because Google is an ads company. Schools love chrome books and gsuite, but struggle with trusting an add company.
vezycash 8y ago
Once read that Firefox is working on a Chrome-like language translation feature. Anyone know when it'll be done?
zelos 8y ago
Anybody else seeing blurry text for the bookmark toolbar and background tab titles? macOS 10.14 on an external monitor.
- zelos 8y ago
  Hmm, looks like it only happens with dark theme enabled, it looks ok in light mode.
vishnu_ks 8y ago
I don't understand why Firefox doesn't include an option to download the .deb package instead of tar file for Ubuntu and Debian during release announcements. The market share is already shrinking and why make it harder for people to install or upgrade Firefox? Chrome does it. Why can't Firefox do that as well?
- afroboy 8y ago
  You can update easily Firefox from tar file, it has local updates no need for official repository.
- reidrac 8y ago
  I'm just guessing here, but Chrome is not packaged by the distro whilst Firefox is. Personally I like the tar. That's my preferred way to use Firefox in Debian. I untar on ~/apps/firefox, symlink to my ~/bin and it is ready to go. The auto-update of Firefox works perfect, so I don't need to use Debian packages for that.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  This brings up an interesting point about releasing software in general. If you spend huge amounts of time programming cool things and tuning every last knob, but then it is difficult for your average user to find out how to install and start to see all the cool things you've produced, when it would take far less time to just make an easy installer than it took you to make all the cool things, then there needs to be some balance in usability. The pipeline to getting the software in front of someone is sometimes more important than adding new cool features. A basic thing that is easy to use will get more adoption than a mind-blowingly awesome thing that only sys-admins can figure out how to use.
  - daleharvey 8y ago
    "Ubuntu and Debian" "average user" I dont disagree with your point, not sure it is relevant however.
    - 8y ago
kemenaran 8y ago
Handoff on macOS, finally! \o/ Just tested opening Firefox on iOS, and the "Open page in Firefox" pops up in the Dock of my Mac. Neat. (It is advertised as also working with Mobile Safari.)
- kbd 8y ago
  Does any of this work with Firefox on Windows/Linux? It would be nice to have this kind of syncing across all platforms.
lol768 8y ago
I was intrigued by this statement: > A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1 Since I don't care about Windows, I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not. At least using Firefox Developer Edition v66, it works fine behind the media.av1.enabled flag on Linux. ---- Also seems that https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/#firefox65 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... has yet to be updated.
- gourlaysama 8y ago
  > I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not. AV1 support is available on all platforms behing the flag; this release just enables it by default on Windows [1]. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452146 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452146
  - TD-Linux 8y ago
    AV1 also uses the brand new media codec sandboxing feature (RDD process). It has platform specific code, hence why only Windows was ready by 65 (but Mac + Linux should be available soon).
agurk 8y ago
Is there any news on Wayland support? I had read here previously that Firefox 65 was when support was going to be available by default[0] but there are no references in the release notes. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657960
- glandium 8y ago
  It's opt-in at runtime. https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899 https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506 And because that can cause problems when spawning third party applications from Firefox, there's another environment variable to opt-in in last nightly: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780
shaklee3 8y ago
I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I've only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  HN users are just natural grumblers. Firefox is very fast these days.
- epage 8y ago
  I've only seen people complain about WebRender on Mac. Looks like the cause is known and looking to be fixed this year [1]. [1] See "Adding support for native OS compositors to WebRender" on https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html
- kerng 8y ago
  Firefox is fantastic! But I have noticed a similar trend with Firefox getting negative comments. One particular reason might be that HN has a lot of current and former Google employees on it, and they are pretty vocal and actively defend Google and downvote everything else - I have experienced this multiple times when bringing up anything negative about Chrome - which is really not that great of a browser. Especially the security (look at past number of patches) and memory usage is bad. I'm not sure why the community here speaks so highly about it.
  - techntoke 8y ago
    I personally find the opposite, where it is usually Mozilla fans bashing Chrome. Mozilla doesn't have any better record when it comes to security. I still have access to all my favorite privacy extensions within Chromium. I also find the performance on Linux (Arch with VAAPI) for Chromium to be much better than Firefox.
- magicalhippo 8y ago
  I can't compare to Chrome since I haven't really used it for over 10 years, but Firefox for me is fast enough. The main issue is still memory usage IMO. The way they implemented multiprocess browsing was to have a few long-lived processes rather than one per tab. Over time these processes tend to use a lot of memory, as scripts invariably seem to leak. But, if I interpret the memes correctly Chrome isn't exactly frugal either.
curt15 8y ago
What would it take for firefox to support Gmail's offline mode?
- prolepunk 8y ago
  I'm not trolling (that's propbably not a good opening). You can connect to Gmail using IMAP with Thunderbird. With google creating new email apps and then killing them off (hello Inbox!) having one consistent interface with programmable filters gives me most of what I want. I used to complain about how dated thunderbird interface looked, but now I find consistency of it to be a feature.
gardaani 8y ago
FF65 also supports WebP images and animations. Here's few test images: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery1 https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery1
- rayshan 8y ago
  After 8 years, thank god! Image heavy pages load 40% faster now, like my photography index with lots more test images: https://shan.io/photography/ https://shan.io/photography/
- e12e 8y ago
  Cool, thanks for the tip. Went to the page and was disappointed to see broken webp images - then checked Google play for updates, got the latest ff - went back and could see the webp images :) Finally.... We've been waiting too long...
- arifmeticus 8y ago
  I wish they implemented the feature sooner. AVIF, an image format based on the new AV1 video codec with even better compression is already on the horizon.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
    Yes. As much as I was hoping they'd implement it back then, I kind of wish that they didn't implement it now. If they couldn't do it years ago, might as well wait for AVIF instead of letting webp proliferate.
yuchi 8y ago
> Support for Handoff on macOS: Continue browsing across devices. Pick up where you left off with iOS (via Firefox or Safari) on Firefox on Mac. OH YES! Finally!
- Shivetya 8y ago
  I tried both Safari and Chrome of macOS but went back to Firefox for one simple reason. When watching streaming content if the browser was not in the foreground it would reduce the quality of the streamed content which could take almost ten seconds to revert back when focus was given. Firefox doesn't seem to know/care if its not top window
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    Safari user, always play videos in a background window, never seen this. I suspect it’s not the browser’s video playback but perhaps more to do with how it handles spikes and drops in connection quality?
- jamiek88 8y ago
  This alone makes me consider Firefox again! Handoff (when it works)is just so useful. Still a little flaky even for apple apps so interested to see how it works on Firefox.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  I didn't realize Handoff was even possible for third party apps!
  - Tomte 8y ago
    I suppose there is no way to make it work with Firefox on Windows and iOS? That would be awesome!
    - 8y ago
Flimm 8y ago
No one mentioned WebP support yet! This is great news, Firefox will now feel faster on all the sites that use WebP. Safari is the last major browser to hold out.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  What's so great about webp? I haven't heard about it. Is it one of those jpeg competitors? Because I did see a blog post recently that said none of the the things people are coming up with are more than marginally better despite jpeg's age.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    I suspect those blog posts focused on photos. However, WebP works well for a much larger range of image types[0]. It has lossless options with better compression than PNG (because PNG is incredibly simple compared to more recent image formats, in my opinion in a kind of beautiful way). And when compressing graphically simple illustrations with lossy settings, it can get much better results than JPG, both compression and quality wise. Having said that, I still hope FLIF (or some descendant of it) will get some traction eventually[1]. [0] https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/png-vs-webp/ https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/png-vs-webp/ [1] http://flif.info/ http://flif.info/
  - jerieljan 8y ago
    In my experience, webps are smaller (25% - 50%) compared to their jpeg counterparts with same or similar levels of quality.
lugg 8y ago
Recently switched from chromium to Firefox. Very pleased with its performance. Android Firefox demolishes chrome too but probably just because I no longer need to download and render all the ads (thanks ublock.) While I was at it I also took the chance to migrate passwords out of Google land into Bitwarden. Session restore is amazing, my .cache is tmpfs but it still manages to instantly recover all my tabs on reboot. Tabs are addictive in FF and don't have the same usage constraints like in chrome. The container system for managing different developer/test/personal profiles is a dream. No longer have to worry about Slack links opening in whatever random chrome instance had focus last. (Back up your user data, sync on these container settings doesn't work - yet) Also enjoying different proxy profiles per Firefox profile as well. Yes, Work profile + work containers + works SSH tunnel proxy. Personal profile + personal containers + NordVPN. Passwords managed by bitwarden and any required crossover is shared via a private organisation. This gives me minimal work access on my phone, and minimal private passwords on my work profile.(GitHub/stack overflow) It's kind of complicated but it's such a quality of life change coming from 20 odd chrome profiles and the nasty sync issues that ensues. Most people can probably get by with a single profile. I just have multiple systems and need to keep work stuff separate but end up using work laptop as a daily driver most of the time.
- ggpsv 8y ago
  Can you expand on how you set up the profile + containers + vpn and how that works for you?
  - apexalpha 8y ago
    Think he means this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... At least that's for controlling them easily. I use it for Whatsapp web on 2 accounts
    - lugg 8y ago
      Yup that's for containers. It looks like development sorta died on it but I think they will circle back once infrastructure work has been done for sync. For proxies you can use whatever vpn service or plugin[1]. I use paid Nord because I need consistent access to certain countries for testing. There is some tunnel bear/Nord like plugins that have lists of free proxies. 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxy-switcher-webext/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxy-switche...
ddtaylor 8y ago
I hope someday we'll see Duck Duck Go partner with Firefox as the default engine.
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  This is the case on Linux Mint. I can't even set Google as a search provider if I wanted to! Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results, and they kinda suck.
  - ddtaylor 8y ago
    > Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results Do you have any source for this claim?
    - 24gttghh 8y ago
      https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources "In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."
pyr0hu 8y ago
Is it just me, or the font used by FF is changed on OSX? It's a bit crispier and it's not antialiased
- chadk 8y ago
  yeah it is like everything bolded... not just in the menubar, but I think the rendering of webpages is affected too. I feel like I am on a Windows machine. ️
- kemenaran 8y ago
  Are you on macOS Mojave? If yes, it could be because Firefox started honoring the system font settings of Mojave [1]. Enabling font smoothing in System Preferences now results in slighlty bolder fonts, and grayscale font smoothing. Firefox and Chrome needed some time to adjust to these settings, but now have the same rendering than the rest of the system. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495282 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495282
  - pyr0hu 8y ago
    Yes, on latest Mojave. Thanks for the heads up, did not know that FF just started supporting the Mac settings
- whalesalad 8y ago
  Fonts are much beefier for me on OS X. Here is a side by side of Chrome looking at the same PR. https://i.imgur.com/U5eQdqZ.png https://i.imgur.com/U5eQdqZ.png https://i.imgur.com/wHKa4Zu.png https://i.imgur.com/wHKa4Zu.png Edit: This made a difference for me, but it's also changed the feel of every UI element on my mac. I think it's a net win but will take getting used to: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aj3p2v/fonts_too_bold_since_firefox_devedition_660b1/eeue7g4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aj3p2v/fonts_too_b... tl;dr - disable 'use font smoothing when available' in system preferences. After killing and restarting Firefox everything looks normal.
  - pyr0hu 8y ago
wslh 8y ago
At the risk of a downvote storm, a few months ago I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox until I had a call of two hours via Google Hangouts and Firefox started to degrade the voice until a point of no return. I don't know if this is common in very demanding "web apps".
- santialbo 8y ago
  it's common on google apps ;)
- mtgx 8y ago
  Blame Google, not Mozilla. They're doing it on purpose and it's the main reason why more people should make the switch now before it's too late and nothing else works with Google's stuff but Chrome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-to-google-and-that-should-worry-us-all/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-... Google intends to kill Hangouts by the end of the year anyway: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-end-transition-october-gsuite-chat-meet https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-... I don't have any proof for this, but I think everything I've seen about Google's Invoice was also meant to kill the open email standards by convincing everyone that the proprietary "AI-enhanced" features of Invoice were worth it over interoperability with other email providers. Thank goodness that app failed. They're still trying to do it through Gmail now, but it's going to be a much slower process and hopefully people will have enough time to catch on to them before it's too late. Google is becoming a monopoly in the classical "evil company" sense - a monopoly that's no different than any other monopoly in the past, and that will try to exploit the users and kill competition in the same way others have done it before. More people should start to seriously consider this before going more "all-in" with Google than they already have.
  - soohyung 8y ago
    > I don't have any proof for this That sums it up nicely.
- CalRobert 8y ago
fxfan 8y ago
Still waiting for vimperator so I can use browser like I used to use only 2 years back. Tridactyl is good but no :map, no :js and alphabets instead of numbers for links.
- driverdan 8y ago
  Have you tried Vimium?
  - fxfan 8y ago
    No I have not- I think they were not trying for full vimperator compatibility and now your sibling comment has informed me that tridactyl is already close. So I probably won't try to switch... :)
- bovine3dom 8y ago
  When did you last look at Tridactyl? - :js is there - You can have numbers with :set hintstyle numeric - You can have Vimperator style link filtering with :set hintfiltermode vimperator - There's no map (and probably never will be), but you can bind sequences of keys to "ex-commands", which is probably 99% of what you want, e.g, :bind <C-b>t open google what time is it The main problem I have with Tridactyl is that it's pretty janky at the moment.
  - fxfan 8y ago
    You're godsent- `:js` is there now and it works! I tried `:set hintstyle numeric` and the command was accepted but it didn't work. Same for `hintfiltermode`. But that they exist means I it's probably me doing something wrong. I couldn't get bind to work the way I wanted- I typed `:` followed by `bind w :tabnext<CR>` but that didn't work. Also, C-i for opening vim on textareas and C-c for cancelling a page load don't work either. I'm beginning to think though that "all" stuff already there, it just works differently (JS wasn't there when I tried a few months back) so I just need to re-read the documentation and not expect everything to work "exactly" like vimperator. Thank you so much! You've changed my life (partially :))
smilbandit 8y ago
Darn was hoping for default urls for containers. so when you open a container the tab will open a specific url also.
asdashjdjhb 8y ago
Could any seniors give more information on what do they mean by this firefox update: A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1?
- M2Ys4U 8y ago
  AV1 is a new video codec, produced by the Alliance for Open Media. AOM is a consortium of browser vendors, content producers, streaming platforms, teleconference providers, hardware companies, and others to produce a state of the art, efficient codec that's also free of the outright extortion that comes with patents on codecs from MPEG (like H.264 and H.265).
- rebelwebmaster 8y ago
  The blog post linked from the release notes has some more information about AV1: https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/mozilla-celebrates-release-of-free-high-quality-video-compression-technology-av1-in-firefox-65-7c95f2b7e56 https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/mozilla-celebrates-release-o...
andy_ppp 8y ago
I have turned on Webrender in FF66a (nightly) and it’s fantastic; it sped up a site I quickly threw together for a friend no end [1] and almost everything with lots of graphical painting is buttery smooth. Even though they are only starting in nightly to make it the default on Nvidia hardware it seems to work without incident so far on this 2016 AMD Radeon’d MacBook Pro. [1] https://uparchitects.co.uk/ https://uparchitects.co.uk/ [2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/have-you-tested-webrender/16137 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/have-you-tested-webrender/16...
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  Well the limit in nightly to nvidia on windows is less about saying “we think WebRender only works/is stable on nvidia on windows” than it is about saying “we want more people to try it and possibly send big reports but we don’t want to risk breaking the entire nightly population or have them all sending in big reports, so we will start with a small subpopulation where we think bugs will be due to WebRender rather than graphics drivers”
  - andy_ppp 8y ago
    Ah fantastic, definitely good to stagger the releases. I do understand the driver/stability situation being much more fragmented on Windows, just nice to be able to confirm how big the improvements are to Firefox that are still to come; the fastest browser by a long way IMO!
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Is there any way to enable it outside nightly builds?
  - andy_ppp 8y ago
    Yes the same instructions should work but you might get a more buggy version of Web Render as it'll be an older less debugged version.
howard941 8y ago
I wish I could revert. 65 regressed and the tabs are back above the address bar.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  Firefox has placed tabs above the address bar by default for almost 10 years. Addresses are specific to (inside of/"below") tabs, so the default interface makes better sense.
newscracker 8y ago
I’m a diehard Firefox user and supporter, but with every release there are still things I wait on the WebExtensions support to improve: 1. There’s still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That’s been a big bummer for some years now. 2. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev). 3. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.
- markn951 8y ago
  Best not hold your breath. You are an old-school power user and 99.9% of users no longer know or care about any of the functionality you're talking about. I don't have any specific retorts to your points other than pointing you to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cache/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cach... for a Lazarus replacement (although I thought Firefox does this by default, and I don't understand why you need an extension at all).
  - newscracker 8y ago
    Thanks for the pointer to this extension. I'll check it out. One of the things Lazarus provided (at the cost of adding some effort in maintaining privacy) was to save the history of form fields across sites and across restarts. In my knowledge, Firefox allows saving text fields, but not text areas. Periodic saving and history were quite helpful especially when writing longer walls of text like on HN comments or posts on other platforms.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  I also come to the comments on every Firefox release to see if anything improved on that front. We've been waiting for years indeed, and I guess the only way to get the functionality back is to maintain a set of custom patches (forking basically)... Still disappointed about pushing web extensions with no alternatives available at the time, and if I had looked into the future, I'd have thought the crystal ball was broken as there is still no compatibility years down the line.
chengiz 8y ago
Is per site autoplay control still not available?
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
They finally implemented globalThis [0]! It's not a huge or complex feature, but it's been something I've been wanting for a long time. Now there's a portable way to access the global object. I would've preferred `global`, but that broke web compatibility which made it a non-starter. I just checked and was a bit sad to find that the latest version of node still doesn't support it. This is a bit surprising as globalThis is already supported in Chrome. [0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global
edoloughlin 8y ago
Anyone else had a problem with AMP on Android with Firefox set as the default browser? Tapping on AMP search results from a Google search resulted in a blank page and a never-ending progress bar. Installing the "Redirect AMP to HTML" plugin sort of solves the issues but adds a delay.
shmerl 8y ago
Is there any progress with GPU accelerated video decoding / encoding in the Linux version? Now that WebRender is in place it should be possible? Without it, any WebRTC video conferencing applications are very CPU heavy, which cripples them on laptops especially.
- jhasse 8y ago
  I don't think WebRender has anything to do with accelerated video decoding. Here's the bug btw: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727
  - shmerl 8y ago
    WebRender seems to be a prerequisite for it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206 > The GPU->GPU copy is only usable if you also have hardware accelerated composition. I thought WebRender is implementing such compositor.
    - jhasse 8y ago
      It is, but there was also another one in Firefox (you could enable it on Linux by setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true).
      - shmerl 8y ago
        I suppose they didn't want to actively work on such features for something that's going to be deprecated. Since WebRender is their way forward, they can as well implement video acceleration together with it.
jniedrauer 8y ago
I'm very happy with the wayland performance in this release. XWayland looks really bad with sway on a HiDPI display, and previous to this release, firefox wayland was too slow to be usable. That's no longer true. I'm giddy with how clear everything looks and how fast it is. This is a huge deal for me.
letsgetsilly 8y ago
I'd love to switch over to Firefox, but I'm used to Chrome's developer toolkit. I understand it thoroughly and can use it proficiently. Any insight as to the comparison between the state of FF's developer tools and Chrome's would be appreciated. I'd love to be convinced to switch.
- 333c 8y ago
  I don't use Chrome or its developer tools, but I do use Firefox's. They work well for my needs, because I can inspect network requests, including editing and re-sending them, and I can debug JS.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    Wait, how do you edit/resend a network request?
    - 333c 8y ago
      Using the network inspector, there's a button when you click on a specific request to edit and resend it. Here's a SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28775346 https://stackoverflow.com/a/28775346
      - cimmanom 8y ago
        Thank you! This is my new killer feature!
andrepd 8y ago
How do the new privacy blocker settings interfere or conflict with uBlock?
- asadotzler 8y ago
  You mean the enhanced tracking protection? There's no interference or conflict with uBlock.
  - joveian 8y ago
    It can at least be confusing and there might be conflicts. I'd recommend turning off the built in tracking protection if using other tracking. They might have fixed the particular issue, but at one point I had stupidly enabled "strict" tracking protection and used that with uMatrix and found that it broke something major (I forget what, maybe reCaptcha) even when the internal tracking was disabled on a per-site basis. Very confusing and unnecessary to have the internal tracking protection if you already use a blocker.
imagetic 8y ago
Huge props to the Mozilla crew. Firefox has been an awesome browser and I'm thankful for their product. My only major gripe is video sort of sucks in it, especially when I'm on my laptop. I'm glad we're starting to see AV1 rolling out in places. Full support can't come soon enough. Last year at NAB everyone was saying it's about 2 years out from solid support. 2020 should be a good year. AV1 looks pretty promising.
vardump 8y ago
Downloaded Firefox 65 (Windows) and quickly loaded a web page... and still no pinch zoom. :-( I hope macOS & Windows Firefox will get pinch zoom soon, so that I can finally switch from Chrome. Firefox seems to have good performance and user-centric features & functionality.
- lucasverra 8y ago
  there is a capable extension for that https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom
smileypete 8y ago
The other day I found out that live bookmarks can still be made to work in Firefox 64, in a way: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/advckx/live_boomarks_still_kind_of_works_in_firefox_64/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/advckx/live_boomar... Not sure if the same applies to 65, but it might help someone...
satysin 8y ago
I would love to switch to Firefox but it still lacks - * Per-site JavaScript controls (which Chrome has) * Pinch to zoom (on macOS) * Customisable keyboard shortcuts for Add-ons (which Chrome has) * No elastic scroll (bounce effect) (which Chrome has) I stick with Chrome as it works how I want it to although I find myself using Safari now and then but Safari's extensions are pretty crap in comparison to Chromes.
- asadotzler 8y ago
  Customizable keyboard shortcuts for extensions just landed in nightly last week. Expect it soon.
  - satysin 8y ago
    Well god damn! I had no idea. Thank you for replying :)
- ComodoHacker 8y ago
  >Per-site JavaScript controls It has, but lacks UI. But extensions (uBO/uMatrix) do that (and more) way better.
- haxiomic 8y ago
  Smooth pinch to zoom is in development but until it's done I've made an add-on for it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-zoom/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-z...
- vardump 8y ago
  > * Pinch to zoom (on macOS) And Windows!
ComodoHacker 8y ago
Fantastic product, excellent release. Just a little complain if website team reads this. Being on main landing page[0] there is no way to find out which version of Firefox is currently the latest. 0. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
unsignedint 8y ago
Chrome has a very annoying (and somewhat severe) Japanese input issue on Linux and pretty much forced me to use Firefox.[0] But I do like Firefox from feature perspectives, too. [0]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=681389 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=681389
jedberg 8y ago
I recently made the transition back to Firefox too, like a lot of other folks in here it seems. Containers makes working with all my AWS much easier, and the containers isolating Facebook are great. One problem though, that I can't solve, is that every once in a while I want to log in with Facebook, like for AirBnB. But I can't, because the cookie only lives in the Facebook container, but I can't add AirBnB as a hostname to the Facebook container. Has anyone solved this? Edit: I just solved this. You have to disable the built in Facebook Container extension and then it works as expected.
- evanwalsh 8y ago
  If you use the Multi-Account Containers extension, you can set AirBnB to always open in the "Facebook" container so it'd have access to your Facebook cookies.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    I do use that extension, but it specifically blocks you from adding new domains to the Facebook container, which is built into Firefox. I can't figure out how to turn off that built in one and use the multi-account one instead.
    - ssvss 8y ago
      > I can't figure out how to turn off that built in one I don't see the facebook container to be built-in. I have only the multi-account container extension installed, and I can make any website to open by default in the container I have created for facebook. I think, you will have to uninstall/disable the facebook-container extension, and just have the multi-account container extension enabled. FB container - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont... Multi-account container - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
- wiktental 8y ago
  Would you happen to know how safe and separate the containers are? Like, if I had a specific container used for Banking sites, would it be relatively safe from other containers? Currently, I use Firefox for casual browsing and Chrome for email and financial related sites. But it would be nice to just use Firefox for both. I'm just worried it would be less safe.
eikenberry 8y ago
Any big reasons to up date to this over the ESR release (60)? So far it seems like mostly minor updates since then or did I miss something?
zwayhowder 8y ago
The hard-coded alt+# for switching to numbered tabs is a deal breaker for me. I wish it wasn't but I have ingrained ctrl+# for switching and alt+# is used for my window manager. I accept I'm in a minority, but it seems like a strange design decision for an open browser.
abryzak 8y ago
I just updated and immediately noticed two things that bothered me: 1. It added a new search engine (amazon.com.au) to my list that I'd culled down to just DuckDuckGo 2. It started recommending extensions for websites I visited Maybe I'm overreacting a bit but why does it feel like every time I update anything recently I then have to spend 5 minutes going through the preferences to make sure it hasn't changed anything. It makes me hesitant to update any app when I feel like the developers are working against my interests.
- richjdsmith 8y ago
  I was annoyed about the recommending plugins thing as well. It's quick to turn off if that's any help.
skykooler 8y ago
> Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart). Excellent! The number of times I've accidentally hit ctrl+q instead of ctrl+w and then had to relaunch firefox and restore my session - this will be a welcome relief.
- jeena 8y ago
  This stopped happening to me once I moved to Dvorak.
leandot 8y ago
Finally it seems the performance issues on macbook pro with retina display have been solved, at least for me!
copperx 8y ago
Tangential, but has anyone here figured out how to get menu copy and paste working in Firefox on webapps such as Google Docs? I've tried suggestions such as changing the dom.clipboard settings in about:config, but that doesn't help.
TylerH 8y ago
Happy with a lot of stuff 65 introduced (this is a nice trend in a lot of recent Firefox releases) One thing I'm not happy about; opted-in recommendations for addons when you browse websites.
mmwelt 8y ago
The energy usage in the task manager doesn't seem to be very accurate. I tested by opening a new window with a cpu-intensive webpage (http://www.digitalattackmap.com http://www.digitalattackmap.com). Real CPU usage jumps all the way up, but energy usage in the task manager is still showing low. Why?
ncmncm 8y ago
I'm hoping it will be less crashy than the last three or four releases. But they don't say so in the announcement... Does anybody know whether we get to blame Servo for the crashiness? Rust code is supposed to be "safe", but that never really pans out in industrial use; maturity is a better predictor of stability.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
I really like Firefox containers. Having different containers for each of Google, Google G Suite, Hacker News, Twitter, and Reddit lets me have one browser open and keep cookies separate. I started using Firefox again when I got a new Linux laptop last December (from Sytem76 - love it). After getting used to having containers, then I started also using Firefox again on my MacBook.
Friedduck 8y ago
Committed FF user after finding you can stop auto playing HTML5 videos without the need for an extension. Plus: Google’s auto-login debacle which precipitated the move.
shostack 8y ago
Is there any decent mouse gesture solution yet?

724 points by theodorejb 8y ago

Does anyone know what the decoding performance of AV1 is these days? I'd love to play with it, but back when I last tried my oldish laptop did NOT like decoding it.

leeoniya 8y ago
dav1d is the state of the art currently, but i dont know if it's used by FF. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d
- padenot 8y ago
  It is, however it's not enabled by default for now. It will be in a few releases after we figure about a couple issues with the build system.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    For people that would like to follow along from home, here's the Firefox bug for switching to the dav1d decoder: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=dav1d https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=dav1d
gardaani 8y ago
I have tried AV1 video on Chrome and it seems to be using the same amount of CPU as VP9 on my computer. I can't test Firefox support for AV1 on my Mac, because it seems to work only on Windows.
- ignaloidas 8y ago
  It's only on windows by default, but you can enable it using about:config flag media.av1.enabled
- M2Ys4U 8y ago
  I've been running with AV1 enabled on Linux (via about:config) for a while - maybe flipping the pref will work for you?

oosjc9a5 8y ago

A question regarding the advertisements they show on the home page: https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-bookingcom-ad-in-the-new-tab-page/ https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-boo... Are these ads introduced with these updates, or does Firefox include a backdoor so the Mozilla Corporation can show whatever they want on your home page?

NamTaf 8y ago
In addition to this: Even though the link claims that it is not a paid placement, it's still an advertisement. If Mozilla really wants to provide more value to me, they'll tell me how to permanently disable it. Its presence provides negative value to me.
- oosjc9a5 8y ago
  Of course they paid for it... Do you really think the Mozilla Corporation has sent an ad to millions of users for free? Whether that money went to the corporation or to the pocket of an executive, that's another matter.
  - NamTaf 8y ago
    Then the statement "It was not a paid placement or advertisement." is blatantly false. they simply say whether it was paid, not whether it was paid to a specific entity.
    - acdha 8y ago
      Read the statement more carefully: > This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent. It could be that they are knowingly making public statements which are untrue and will expose themselves to legal liability for that or it could be that the statement means exactly what it says and that Mozilla is experimenting with promotions for using Firefox which do not involve money changing hands, especially if they're just gauging interest to see whether people even click on those regions. The concert was definitely promoted as a “Thanks for using Firefox” deal so I would not be at all surprised to learn that Booking.com gave a modest discount as part of a deal where no money changed hands as per the statement.

sambe 8y ago

I feel like I've been waiting a long time for autoplay blocking - does this keep being pushed back or have I missed a feature cancellation/config setting/extension announcement?

NamTaf 8y ago
I was hoping to see this pushed out by default because I agree that it's the best 'new' feature I've found in the browser in some time. You can change it in about:config, searching for 'media.autoplay'. I've changed the following: 1) Set 'ask permission' to true 2) Set 'block webaudio' to true 3) Set default to 2, which is 'ask per domain'. As I understand, the default of 0 is 'autoplay', 1 is 'block' and 2 is 'ask' but your favourite search engine of choice can provide clarification on this and the other settings. 2 will cause a pop-up beside the URL bar, like with password save popups, letting you accept or block and with a checkbox to set it permanent.
- vezycash 8y ago
  Why don't they write it as Block, Ask, Allow? Much easier this way.
  - andy_ppp 8y ago
    I’m sure pull requests or bug reports are welcome from Mozilla if you feel strongly about it.
  - NamTaf 8y ago
    Apparently, setting both “ask-permission” and “enabled.user-gestures-needed” to true then enables a setting in the privacy area of settings to have a dropdown box with these options. I’m guessing it maps to the 0/1/2 setting I mentioned earlier https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033
    - joveian 8y ago
      Thanks! I also found this page with a bit more info on the settings: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxMediaAutoplaySettingsII?showcomments https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxMediaAut... I changed all the media.autoplay settings from the default except block-event.enabled, with default set to 1. With that it seems to do what I want. I'm not sure if the strange media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground behavior described in the comment is still happening but I set that to false also.

darkpuma 8y ago

>Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart). To whoever is responsible for pushing this change through: Thank you.

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Yes, it is much appreciated. Can't tell you how many times my finger has slipped and hit Ctrl+Q instead of Ctrl+W. Oh well! I didn't need all that work...
- soft_dev_person 8y ago
  So you can't get it back? I usually use Chrome, I never lose my session no matter what I slip up to do.
  - soft_dev_person 8y ago
    Thanks for the downvote, whomever. I always consider switching to Firefox, as I think Chrome needs competition, but Firefox has just never been up to par in usability (especially developer usability) whenever I've tried to switch. Things like "losing your work" for no good reason (don't Firefox have "Re-open closed Window"?) is just another thing I would add to the list of reasons not to switch, so feel free to clarify.
    - detaro 8y ago
      To quote from the initial comment: > (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart). It also already has an optional check if you want to close a window ("you're closing a window with 10 tabs. sure?"), and a list of recently closed windows to restore.
      - soft_dev_person 8y ago
        I interpreted the change as if it would always show the quit warning regardless of any settings, since the warning popup is not exactly a new feature. Some more context helped clarify.

pointillistic 8y ago

No changes to the interface again! Will not go back to FF till they take graphic design seriously.

meesterdude 8y ago
curious, what changes do you want to see?
- pointillistic 8y ago
  Here are my comments. There is too much color in the tab and bookmarks bars. It should fade with focus on the content. The icons are too contrasting, the outlive around the folders is too harsh. I don't think they changed the icons design in 10 years or more. I find his lack of aesthetic attention jarring. Same goes for navigation and settings interface.
0xffff2 8y ago
What changes do you want to see? There's so little chrome left in the browser these days that I'm not sure what there is to design besides the appearance of tabs, which is easily customizable.
da_chicken 8y ago
I'm also curious. What does Firefox do so much worse than Chrome, Safari, or IE? The interfaces of all four are more or less identical.
detritus 8y ago
As a someone who works in the design industry, I appreciate it when ‘graphic design’ takes a backseat where my browser is concerned and they just let the UI merge as discretely with the OS interface as possible... ...and from here, that's exactly what it appears to be doing!

olavgg 8y ago

I love Firefox and use it all the time, but for the last few years one of my biggest pains is the OSX performance on my Macbook Pro. Is this close to be resolved soon?

minedwiz 8y ago
It’s strange - I could have sworn that, for a while around where “quantum” was released, OS X performance was really quite good. I ditched it for chrome for a bit, and it even held up with my daily 20+ tabs.
bluejekyll 8y ago
What do you mean by performance? I’ve found Firefox to be generally faster than Safari and Chrome on my MacBook Pro. I generally find it to be more energy efficient than Chrome, but Safari is still king there. This is personal experience, no lab tests, etc.
epage 8y ago
I wonder if this is due to not using the native compositor which they are looking at fixing this year. See "Adding support for native OS compositors to WebRender" at https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html
acdha 8y ago
Are you using a non-native display resolution? That seems to be the common factor for people who have significant problems. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
- amimetic 8y ago
  A scaled resolution is now default on most MacBooks. I haven't noticed battery problems but certainly seen RAM usage at least double that of Chrome and considerably above Safari.
  - 8y ago

numbsafari 8y ago

I wish Mozilla started to compete with Google on ChromeOS. Just make it the browser and leverage containers to keep things locked down. There’s a total business here and Mozilla could make it happen, without the entanglements of the ads business. Real missed opportunity to help promote open standards at the services level as well.

vezycash 8y ago
They had FirefoxOS remember? Doubt think they'll want to do it again soon.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  A relevant recent article: https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec32d94f0 https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec3...
- tombert 8y ago
  I think the intended market for FirefoxOS was pretty different than ChromeOS. Wasn't FirefoxOS for low-powered phones? ChromeOS is designed around a "streamlined" laptop system.
  - Zhyl 8y ago
    Yeah, FFOS essentially had the SteamOS problem - targeting a market that didn't have any 'wedge' users in their existing demographics. For Firefox OS and Steam OS to take off you needed to buy new hardware and the people most on board with this already had hardware and didn't have a use case for buying more (low end phone for Firefox, PC-as-a-console for SteamOS). In either case there was a small pool of first movers and then almost no early adopters. This was pretty stark in the steam case as Linux usage, sales and games rose considerably but hardware sales were pretty thin.
    - numbsafari 8y ago
      Schools. Schools would be pretty motivated to drop Google because Google is an ads company. Schools love chrome books and gsuite, but struggle with trusting an add company.

vezycash 8y ago

Once read that Firefox is working on a Chrome-like language translation feature. Anyone know when it'll be done?

zelos 8y ago

Anybody else seeing blurry text for the bookmark toolbar and background tab titles? macOS 10.14 on an external monitor.

zelos 8y ago
Hmm, looks like it only happens with dark theme enabled, it looks ok in light mode.

vishnu_ks 8y ago

I don't understand why Firefox doesn't include an option to download the .deb package instead of tar file for Ubuntu and Debian during release announcements. The market share is already shrinking and why make it harder for people to install or upgrade Firefox? Chrome does it. Why can't Firefox do that as well?

afroboy 8y ago
You can update easily Firefox from tar file, it has local updates no need for official repository.
reidrac 8y ago
I'm just guessing here, but Chrome is not packaged by the distro whilst Firefox is. Personally I like the tar. That's my preferred way to use Firefox in Debian. I untar on ~/apps/firefox, symlink to my ~/bin and it is ready to go. The auto-update of Firefox works perfect, so I don't need to use Debian packages for that.
brobdingnagians 8y ago
This brings up an interesting point about releasing software in general. If you spend huge amounts of time programming cool things and tuning every last knob, but then it is difficult for your average user to find out how to install and start to see all the cool things you've produced, when it would take far less time to just make an easy installer than it took you to make all the cool things, then there needs to be some balance in usability. The pipeline to getting the software in front of someone is sometimes more important than adding new cool features. A basic thing that is easy to use will get more adoption than a mind-blowingly awesome thing that only sys-admins can figure out how to use.
- daleharvey 8y ago
  "Ubuntu and Debian" "average user" I dont disagree with your point, not sure it is relevant however.
  - 8y ago

kemenaran 8y ago

Handoff on macOS, finally! \o/ Just tested opening Firefox on iOS, and the "Open page in Firefox" pops up in the Dock of my Mac. Neat. (It is advertised as also working with Mobile Safari.)

kbd 8y ago
Does any of this work with Firefox on Windows/Linux? It would be nice to have this kind of syncing across all platforms.

lol768 8y ago

I was intrigued by this statement: > A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1 Since I don't care about Windows, I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not. At least using Firefox Developer Edition v66, it works fine behind the media.av1.enabled flag on Linux. ---- Also seems that https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/#firefox65 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... has yet to be updated.

gourlaysama 8y ago
> I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not. AV1 support is available on all platforms behing the flag; this release just enables it by default on Windows [1]. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452146 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452146
- TD-Linux 8y ago
  AV1 also uses the brand new media codec sandboxing feature (RDD process). It has platform specific code, hence why only Windows was ready by 65 (but Mac + Linux should be available soon).

agurk 8y ago

Is there any news on Wayland support? I had read here previously that Firefox 65 was when support was going to be available by default[0] but there are no references in the release notes. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657960

glandium 8y ago
It's opt-in at runtime. https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899 https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506 And because that can cause problems when spawning third party applications from Firefox, there's another environment variable to opt-in in last nightly: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780

shaklee3 8y ago

I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I've only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?

ForHackernews 8y ago
HN users are just natural grumblers. Firefox is very fast these days.
epage 8y ago
I've only seen people complain about WebRender on Mac. Looks like the cause is known and looking to be fixed this year [1]. [1] See "Adding support for native OS compositors to WebRender" on https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html
kerng 8y ago
Firefox is fantastic! But I have noticed a similar trend with Firefox getting negative comments. One particular reason might be that HN has a lot of current and former Google employees on it, and they are pretty vocal and actively defend Google and downvote everything else - I have experienced this multiple times when bringing up anything negative about Chrome - which is really not that great of a browser. Especially the security (look at past number of patches) and memory usage is bad. I'm not sure why the community here speaks so highly about it.
- techntoke 8y ago
  I personally find the opposite, where it is usually Mozilla fans bashing Chrome. Mozilla doesn't have any better record when it comes to security. I still have access to all my favorite privacy extensions within Chromium. I also find the performance on Linux (Arch with VAAPI) for Chromium to be much better than Firefox.
magicalhippo 8y ago
I can't compare to Chrome since I haven't really used it for over 10 years, but Firefox for me is fast enough. The main issue is still memory usage IMO. The way they implemented multiprocess browsing was to have a few long-lived processes rather than one per tab. Over time these processes tend to use a lot of memory, as scripts invariably seem to leak. But, if I interpret the memes correctly Chrome isn't exactly frugal either.

curt15 8y ago

What would it take for firefox to support Gmail's offline mode?

prolepunk 8y ago
I'm not trolling (that's propbably not a good opening). You can connect to Gmail using IMAP with Thunderbird. With google creating new email apps and then killing them off (hello Inbox!) having one consistent interface with programmable filters gives me most of what I want. I used to complain about how dated thunderbird interface looked, but now I find consistency of it to be a feature.

gardaani 8y ago

FF65 also supports WebP images and animations. Here's few test images: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery1 https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery1

rayshan 8y ago
After 8 years, thank god! Image heavy pages load 40% faster now, like my photography index with lots more test images: https://shan.io/photography/ https://shan.io/photography/
e12e 8y ago
Cool, thanks for the tip. Went to the page and was disappointed to see broken webp images - then checked Google play for updates, got the latest ff - went back and could see the webp images :) Finally.... We've been waiting too long...
arifmeticus 8y ago
I wish they implemented the feature sooner. AVIF, an image format based on the new AV1 video codec with even better compression is already on the horizon.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
  Yes. As much as I was hoping they'd implement it back then, I kind of wish that they didn't implement it now. If they couldn't do it years ago, might as well wait for AVIF instead of letting webp proliferate.

yuchi 8y ago

> Support for Handoff on macOS: Continue browsing across devices. Pick up where you left off with iOS (via Firefox or Safari) on Firefox on Mac. OH YES! Finally!

Shivetya 8y ago
I tried both Safari and Chrome of macOS but went back to Firefox for one simple reason. When watching streaming content if the browser was not in the foreground it would reduce the quality of the streamed content which could take almost ten seconds to revert back when focus was given. Firefox doesn't seem to know/care if its not top window
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  Safari user, always play videos in a background window, never seen this. I suspect it’s not the browser’s video playback but perhaps more to do with how it handles spikes and drops in connection quality?
jamiek88 8y ago
This alone makes me consider Firefox again! Handoff (when it works)is just so useful. Still a little flaky even for apple apps so interested to see how it works on Firefox.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
I didn't realize Handoff was even possible for third party apps!
- Tomte 8y ago
  I suppose there is no way to make it work with Firefox on Windows and iOS? That would be awesome!
  - 8y ago

Flimm 8y ago

No one mentioned WebP support yet! This is great news, Firefox will now feel faster on all the sites that use WebP. Safari is the last major browser to hold out.

lucb1e 8y ago
What's so great about webp? I haven't heard about it. Is it one of those jpeg competitors? Because I did see a blog post recently that said none of the the things people are coming up with are more than marginally better despite jpeg's age.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  I suspect those blog posts focused on photos. However, WebP works well for a much larger range of image types[0]. It has lossless options with better compression than PNG (because PNG is incredibly simple compared to more recent image formats, in my opinion in a kind of beautiful way). And when compressing graphically simple illustrations with lossy settings, it can get much better results than JPG, both compression and quality wise. Having said that, I still hope FLIF (or some descendant of it) will get some traction eventually[1]. [0] https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/png-vs-webp/ https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/png-vs-webp/ [1] http://flif.info/ http://flif.info/
- jerieljan 8y ago
  In my experience, webps are smaller (25% - 50%) compared to their jpeg counterparts with same or similar levels of quality.

lugg 8y ago

Recently switched from chromium to Firefox. Very pleased with its performance. Android Firefox demolishes chrome too but probably just because I no longer need to download and render all the ads (thanks ublock.) While I was at it I also took the chance to migrate passwords out of Google land into Bitwarden. Session restore is amazing, my .cache is tmpfs but it still manages to instantly recover all my tabs on reboot. Tabs are addictive in FF and don't have the same usage constraints like in chrome. The container system for managing different developer/test/personal profiles is a dream. No longer have to worry about Slack links opening in whatever random chrome instance had focus last. (Back up your user data, sync on these container settings doesn't work - yet) Also enjoying different proxy profiles per Firefox profile as well. Yes, Work profile + work containers + works SSH tunnel proxy. Personal profile + personal containers + NordVPN. Passwords managed by bitwarden and any required crossover is shared via a private organisation. This gives me minimal work access on my phone, and minimal private passwords on my work profile.(GitHub/stack overflow) It's kind of complicated but it's such a quality of life change coming from 20 odd chrome profiles and the nasty sync issues that ensues. Most people can probably get by with a single profile. I just have multiple systems and need to keep work stuff separate but end up using work laptop as a daily driver most of the time.

ggpsv 8y ago
Can you expand on how you set up the profile + containers + vpn and how that works for you?
- apexalpha 8y ago
  Think he means this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... At least that's for controlling them easily. I use it for Whatsapp web on 2 accounts
  - lugg 8y ago
    Yup that's for containers. It looks like development sorta died on it but I think they will circle back once infrastructure work has been done for sync. For proxies you can use whatever vpn service or plugin[1]. I use paid Nord because I need consistent access to certain countries for testing. There is some tunnel bear/Nord like plugins that have lists of free proxies. 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxy-switcher-webext/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxy-switche...

ddtaylor 8y ago

I hope someday we'll see Duck Duck Go partner with Firefox as the default engine.

24gttghh 8y ago
This is the case on Linux Mint. I can't even set Google as a search provider if I wanted to! Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results, and they kinda suck.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  > Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results Do you have any source for this claim?
  - 24gttghh 8y ago
    https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources "In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."

pyr0hu 8y ago

Is it just me, or the font used by FF is changed on OSX? It's a bit crispier and it's not antialiased

chadk 8y ago
yeah it is like everything bolded... not just in the menubar, but I think the rendering of webpages is affected too. I feel like I am on a Windows machine. ️
kemenaran 8y ago
Are you on macOS Mojave? If yes, it could be because Firefox started honoring the system font settings of Mojave [1]. Enabling font smoothing in System Preferences now results in slighlty bolder fonts, and grayscale font smoothing. Firefox and Chrome needed some time to adjust to these settings, but now have the same rendering than the rest of the system. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495282 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495282
- pyr0hu 8y ago
  Yes, on latest Mojave. Thanks for the heads up, did not know that FF just started supporting the Mac settings
whalesalad 8y ago
Fonts are much beefier for me on OS X. Here is a side by side of Chrome looking at the same PR. https://i.imgur.com/U5eQdqZ.png https://i.imgur.com/U5eQdqZ.png https://i.imgur.com/wHKa4Zu.png https://i.imgur.com/wHKa4Zu.png Edit: This made a difference for me, but it's also changed the feel of every UI element on my mac. I think it's a net win but will take getting used to: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aj3p2v/fonts_too_bold_since_firefox_devedition_660b1/eeue7g4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aj3p2v/fonts_too_b... tl;dr - disable 'use font smoothing when available' in system preferences. After killing and restarting Firefox everything looks normal.
- pyr0hu 8y ago

wslh 8y ago

At the risk of a downvote storm, a few months ago I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox until I had a call of two hours via Google Hangouts and Firefox started to degrade the voice until a point of no return. I don't know if this is common in very demanding "web apps".

santialbo 8y ago
it's common on google apps ;)
mtgx 8y ago
Blame Google, not Mozilla. They're doing it on purpose and it's the main reason why more people should make the switch now before it's too late and nothing else works with Google's stuff but Chrome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-to-google-and-that-should-worry-us-all/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-... Google intends to kill Hangouts by the end of the year anyway: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-end-transition-october-gsuite-chat-meet https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-... I don't have any proof for this, but I think everything I've seen about Google's Invoice was also meant to kill the open email standards by convincing everyone that the proprietary "AI-enhanced" features of Invoice were worth it over interoperability with other email providers. Thank goodness that app failed. They're still trying to do it through Gmail now, but it's going to be a much slower process and hopefully people will have enough time to catch on to them before it's too late. Google is becoming a monopoly in the classical "evil company" sense - a monopoly that's no different than any other monopoly in the past, and that will try to exploit the users and kill competition in the same way others have done it before. More people should start to seriously consider this before going more "all-in" with Google than they already have.
- soohyung 8y ago
  > I don't have any proof for this That sums it up nicely.
CalRobert 8y ago

fxfan 8y ago

Still waiting for vimperator so I can use browser like I used to use only 2 years back. Tridactyl is good but no :map, no :js and alphabets instead of numbers for links.

driverdan 8y ago
Have you tried Vimium?
- fxfan 8y ago
  No I have not- I think they were not trying for full vimperator compatibility and now your sibling comment has informed me that tridactyl is already close. So I probably won't try to switch... :)
bovine3dom 8y ago
When did you last look at Tridactyl? - :js is there - You can have numbers with :set hintstyle numeric - You can have Vimperator style link filtering with :set hintfiltermode vimperator - There's no map (and probably never will be), but you can bind sequences of keys to "ex-commands", which is probably 99% of what you want, e.g, :bind <C-b>t open google what time is it The main problem I have with Tridactyl is that it's pretty janky at the moment.
- fxfan 8y ago
  You're godsent- `:js` is there now and it works! I tried `:set hintstyle numeric` and the command was accepted but it didn't work. Same for `hintfiltermode`. But that they exist means I it's probably me doing something wrong. I couldn't get bind to work the way I wanted- I typed `:` followed by `bind w :tabnext<CR>` but that didn't work. Also, C-i for opening vim on textareas and C-c for cancelling a page load don't work either. I'm beginning to think though that "all" stuff already there, it just works differently (JS wasn't there when I tried a few months back) so I just need to re-read the documentation and not expect everything to work "exactly" like vimperator. Thank you so much! You've changed my life (partially :))

smilbandit 8y ago

Darn was hoping for default urls for containers. so when you open a container the tab will open a specific url also.

asdashjdjhb 8y ago

Could any seniors give more information on what do they mean by this firefox update: A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1?

M2Ys4U 8y ago
AV1 is a new video codec, produced by the Alliance for Open Media. AOM is a consortium of browser vendors, content producers, streaming platforms, teleconference providers, hardware companies, and others to produce a state of the art, efficient codec that's also free of the outright extortion that comes with patents on codecs from MPEG (like H.264 and H.265).
rebelwebmaster 8y ago
The blog post linked from the release notes has some more information about AV1: https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/mozilla-celebrates-release-of-free-high-quality-video-compression-technology-av1-in-firefox-65-7c95f2b7e56 https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/mozilla-celebrates-release-o...

andy_ppp 8y ago

I have turned on Webrender in FF66a (nightly) and it’s fantastic; it sped up a site I quickly threw together for a friend no end [1] and almost everything with lots of graphical painting is buttery smooth. Even though they are only starting in nightly to make it the default on Nvidia hardware it seems to work without incident so far on this 2016 AMD Radeon’d MacBook Pro. [1] https://uparchitects.co.uk/ https://uparchitects.co.uk/ [2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/have-you-tested-webrender/16137 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/have-you-tested-webrender/16...

dan-robertson 8y ago
Well the limit in nightly to nvidia on windows is less about saying “we think WebRender only works/is stable on nvidia on windows” than it is about saying “we want more people to try it and possibly send big reports but we don’t want to risk breaking the entire nightly population or have them all sending in big reports, so we will start with a small subpopulation where we think bugs will be due to WebRender rather than graphics drivers”
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  Ah fantastic, definitely good to stagger the releases. I do understand the driver/stability situation being much more fragmented on Windows, just nice to be able to confirm how big the improvements are to Firefox that are still to come; the fastest browser by a long way IMO!
cimmanom 8y ago
Is there any way to enable it outside nightly builds?
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  Yes the same instructions should work but you might get a more buggy version of Web Render as it'll be an older less debugged version.

howard941 8y ago

I wish I could revert. 65 regressed and the tabs are back above the address bar.

theandrewbailey 8y ago
Firefox has placed tabs above the address bar by default for almost 10 years. Addresses are specific to (inside of/"below") tabs, so the default interface makes better sense.

newscracker 8y ago

I’m a diehard Firefox user and supporter, but with every release there are still things I wait on the WebExtensions support to improve: 1. There’s still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That’s been a big bummer for some years now. 2. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev). 3. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.

markn951 8y ago
Best not hold your breath. You are an old-school power user and 99.9% of users no longer know or care about any of the functionality you're talking about. I don't have any specific retorts to your points other than pointing you to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cache/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cach... for a Lazarus replacement (although I thought Firefox does this by default, and I don't understand why you need an extension at all).
- newscracker 8y ago
  Thanks for the pointer to this extension. I'll check it out. One of the things Lazarus provided (at the cost of adding some effort in maintaining privacy) was to save the history of form fields across sites and across restarts. In my knowledge, Firefox allows saving text fields, but not text areas. Periodic saving and history were quite helpful especially when writing longer walls of text like on HN comments or posts on other platforms.
lucb1e 8y ago
I also come to the comments on every Firefox release to see if anything improved on that front. We've been waiting for years indeed, and I guess the only way to get the functionality back is to maintain a set of custom patches (forking basically)... Still disappointed about pushing web extensions with no alternatives available at the time, and if I had looked into the future, I'd have thought the crystal ball was broken as there is still no compatibility years down the line.

chengiz 8y ago

Is per site autoplay control still not available?

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago

They finally implemented globalThis [0]! It's not a huge or complex feature, but it's been something I've been wanting for a long time. Now there's a portable way to access the global object. I would've preferred `global`, but that broke web compatibility which made it a non-starter. I just checked and was a bit sad to find that the latest version of node still doesn't support it. This is a bit surprising as globalThis is already supported in Chrome. [0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global

edoloughlin 8y ago

Anyone else had a problem with AMP on Android with Firefox set as the default browser? Tapping on AMP search results from a Google search resulted in a blank page and a never-ending progress bar. Installing the "Redirect AMP to HTML" plugin sort of solves the issues but adds a delay.

shmerl 8y ago

Is there any progress with GPU accelerated video decoding / encoding in the Linux version? Now that WebRender is in place it should be possible? Without it, any WebRTC video conferencing applications are very CPU heavy, which cripples them on laptops especially.

jhasse 8y ago
I don't think WebRender has anything to do with accelerated video decoding. Here's the bug btw: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727
- shmerl 8y ago
  WebRender seems to be a prerequisite for it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206 > The GPU->GPU copy is only usable if you also have hardware accelerated composition. I thought WebRender is implementing such compositor.
  - jhasse 8y ago
    It is, but there was also another one in Firefox (you could enable it on Linux by setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true).
    - shmerl 8y ago
      I suppose they didn't want to actively work on such features for something that's going to be deprecated. Since WebRender is their way forward, they can as well implement video acceleration together with it.

jniedrauer 8y ago

I'm very happy with the wayland performance in this release. XWayland looks really bad with sway on a HiDPI display, and previous to this release, firefox wayland was too slow to be usable. That's no longer true. I'm giddy with how clear everything looks and how fast it is. This is a huge deal for me.

letsgetsilly 8y ago

I'd love to switch over to Firefox, but I'm used to Chrome's developer toolkit. I understand it thoroughly and can use it proficiently. Any insight as to the comparison between the state of FF's developer tools and Chrome's would be appreciated. I'd love to be convinced to switch.

333c 8y ago
I don't use Chrome or its developer tools, but I do use Firefox's. They work well for my needs, because I can inspect network requests, including editing and re-sending them, and I can debug JS.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Wait, how do you edit/resend a network request?
  - 333c 8y ago
    Using the network inspector, there's a button when you click on a specific request to edit and resend it. Here's a SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28775346 https://stackoverflow.com/a/28775346
    - cimmanom 8y ago
      Thank you! This is my new killer feature!

andrepd 8y ago

How do the new privacy blocker settings interfere or conflict with uBlock?

asadotzler 8y ago
You mean the enhanced tracking protection? There's no interference or conflict with uBlock.
- joveian 8y ago
  It can at least be confusing and there might be conflicts. I'd recommend turning off the built in tracking protection if using other tracking. They might have fixed the particular issue, but at one point I had stupidly enabled "strict" tracking protection and used that with uMatrix and found that it broke something major (I forget what, maybe reCaptcha) even when the internal tracking was disabled on a per-site basis. Very confusing and unnecessary to have the internal tracking protection if you already use a blocker.

imagetic 8y ago

Huge props to the Mozilla crew. Firefox has been an awesome browser and I'm thankful for their product. My only major gripe is video sort of sucks in it, especially when I'm on my laptop. I'm glad we're starting to see AV1 rolling out in places. Full support can't come soon enough. Last year at NAB everyone was saying it's about 2 years out from solid support. 2020 should be a good year. AV1 looks pretty promising.

vardump 8y ago

Downloaded Firefox 65 (Windows) and quickly loaded a web page... and still no pinch zoom. :-( I hope macOS & Windows Firefox will get pinch zoom soon, so that I can finally switch from Chrome. Firefox seems to have good performance and user-centric features & functionality.

lucasverra 8y ago
there is a capable extension for that https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom

smileypete 8y ago

The other day I found out that live bookmarks can still be made to work in Firefox 64, in a way: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/advckx/live_boomarks_still_kind_of_works_in_firefox_64/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/advckx/live_boomar... Not sure if the same applies to 65, but it might help someone...

satysin 8y ago

I would love to switch to Firefox but it still lacks - * Per-site JavaScript controls (which Chrome has) * Pinch to zoom (on macOS) * Customisable keyboard shortcuts for Add-ons (which Chrome has) * No elastic scroll (bounce effect) (which Chrome has) I stick with Chrome as it works how I want it to although I find myself using Safari now and then but Safari's extensions are pretty crap in comparison to Chromes.

asadotzler 8y ago
Customizable keyboard shortcuts for extensions just landed in nightly last week. Expect it soon.
- satysin 8y ago
  Well god damn! I had no idea. Thank you for replying :)
ComodoHacker 8y ago
>Per-site JavaScript controls It has, but lacks UI. But extensions (uBO/uMatrix) do that (and more) way better.
haxiomic 8y ago
Smooth pinch to zoom is in development but until it's done I've made an add-on for it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-zoom/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-z...
vardump 8y ago
> * Pinch to zoom (on macOS) And Windows!

ComodoHacker 8y ago

Fantastic product, excellent release. Just a little complain if website team reads this. Being on main landing page[0] there is no way to find out which version of Firefox is currently the latest. 0. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

unsignedint 8y ago

Chrome has a very annoying (and somewhat severe) Japanese input issue on Linux and pretty much forced me to use Firefox.[0] But I do like Firefox from feature perspectives, too. [0]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=681389 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=681389

jedberg 8y ago

I recently made the transition back to Firefox too, like a lot of other folks in here it seems. Containers makes working with all my AWS much easier, and the containers isolating Facebook are great. One problem though, that I can't solve, is that every once in a while I want to log in with Facebook, like for AirBnB. But I can't, because the cookie only lives in the Facebook container, but I can't add AirBnB as a hostname to the Facebook container. Has anyone solved this? Edit: I just solved this. You have to disable the built in Facebook Container extension and then it works as expected.

evanwalsh 8y ago
If you use the Multi-Account Containers extension, you can set AirBnB to always open in the "Facebook" container so it'd have access to your Facebook cookies.
- jedberg 8y ago
  I do use that extension, but it specifically blocks you from adding new domains to the Facebook container, which is built into Firefox. I can't figure out how to turn off that built in one and use the multi-account one instead.
  - ssvss 8y ago
    > I can't figure out how to turn off that built in one I don't see the facebook container to be built-in. I have only the multi-account container extension installed, and I can make any website to open by default in the container I have created for facebook. I think, you will have to uninstall/disable the facebook-container extension, and just have the multi-account container extension enabled. FB container - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont... Multi-account container - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
wiktental 8y ago
Would you happen to know how safe and separate the containers are? Like, if I had a specific container used for Banking sites, would it be relatively safe from other containers? Currently, I use Firefox for casual browsing and Chrome for email and financial related sites. But it would be nice to just use Firefox for both. I'm just worried it would be less safe.

eikenberry 8y ago

Any big reasons to up date to this over the ESR release (60)? So far it seems like mostly minor updates since then or did I miss something?

zwayhowder 8y ago

The hard-coded alt+# for switching to numbered tabs is a deal breaker for me. I wish it wasn't but I have ingrained ctrl+# for switching and alt+# is used for my window manager. I accept I'm in a minority, but it seems like a strange design decision for an open browser.

abryzak 8y ago

I just updated and immediately noticed two things that bothered me: 1. It added a new search engine (amazon.com.au) to my list that I'd culled down to just DuckDuckGo 2. It started recommending extensions for websites I visited Maybe I'm overreacting a bit but why does it feel like every time I update anything recently I then have to spend 5 minutes going through the preferences to make sure it hasn't changed anything. It makes me hesitant to update any app when I feel like the developers are working against my interests.

richjdsmith 8y ago
I was annoyed about the recommending plugins thing as well. It's quick to turn off if that's any help.

skykooler 8y ago

> Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart). Excellent! The number of times I've accidentally hit ctrl+q instead of ctrl+w and then had to relaunch firefox and restore my session - this will be a welcome relief.

jeena 8y ago
This stopped happening to me once I moved to Dvorak.

leandot 8y ago

Finally it seems the performance issues on macbook pro with retina display have been solved, at least for me!

copperx 8y ago

Tangential, but has anyone here figured out how to get menu copy and paste working in Firefox on webapps such as Google Docs? I've tried suggestions such as changing the dom.clipboard settings in about:config, but that doesn't help.

TylerH 8y ago

Happy with a lot of stuff 65 introduced (this is a nice trend in a lot of recent Firefox releases) One thing I'm not happy about; opted-in recommendations for addons when you browse websites.

mmwelt 8y ago

The energy usage in the task manager doesn't seem to be very accurate. I tested by opening a new window with a cpu-intensive webpage (http://www.digitalattackmap.com http://www.digitalattackmap.com). Real CPU usage jumps all the way up, but energy usage in the task manager is still showing low. Why?

ncmncm 8y ago

I'm hoping it will be less crashy than the last three or four releases. But they don't say so in the announcement... Does anybody know whether we get to blame Servo for the crashiness? Rust code is supposed to be "safe", but that never really pans out in industrial use; maturity is a better predictor of stability.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

I really like Firefox containers. Having different containers for each of Google, Google G Suite, Hacker News, Twitter, and Reddit lets me have one browser open and keep cookies separate. I started using Firefox again when I got a new Linux laptop last December (from Sytem76 - love it). After getting used to having containers, then I started also using Firefox again on my MacBook.

Friedduck 8y ago

Committed FF user after finding you can stop auto playing HTML5 videos without the need for an extension. Plus: Google’s auto-login debacle which precipitated the move.

shostack 8y ago

Is there any decent mouse gesture solution yet?