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Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

• skykooler 8y ago
  "System title bar is hidden by default to match Gnome guideline for Linux users" - which part of the UI does this refer to exactly? Does this mean that Firefox will now be hiding the page title?
  • chronogram 8y ago
    So that it looks like the Windows version: title bar and tabs are together. The close and minimise buttons are to the side of the tabs. I believe this isn’t enabled for KDE Plasma. If you like a separate title bar like the old version of Firefox, then use the hamburger menu, choose “customise” and check the box for the title bar.
    • IronBacon 8y ago
      Unfortunately, it doesn't pick up the actions associated, for example, to the "double-click" or "middle-click" or at least not on my desktop. Someone knows if it's customizable in the config menu, searching the obvious "titlebar" reports only two not useful entries?
      • 29jm 8y ago
        It is, it's a checkbox at the bottom left of the "Customize" panel.
        • IronBacon 8y ago
          I should have explained it better, I was asking about associating actions to the "compact" titlebar (or what's called). I guess I need to wait for a proper GTK3 "header bar", if it's planned at all... Anyway thanks. Edit: in Chrome/Chromium works as I expected, I think I should file a bug then.
  • ekianjo 8y ago
    I assume they mean the application window title bar which simply says Firefox on Gnome.
  • sstangl 8y ago
    It's visible in the tab: https://i.imgur.com/UOvz505.png https://i.imgur.com/UOvz505.png
    • skykooler 8y ago
      That seems problematic; even in your screenshot with just one tab, the title gets cut off after just a couple words.
      • SECProto 8y ago
        It looks like Windows. If it behaves like it, then you can read the full title by hovering over the tab. I haven't used gnome in quite a while, so I'm not totally certain of what was before this change, but I wouldn't consider it problematic. I find that saving the extra 20 pixels at the top is good for the widescreen aspect ratio of most monitors.
      • tux1968 8y ago
        For what it's worth, you can see the entire title by hovering over the truncated text in the tab.
      • joveian 8y ago
        IMO, the title isn't really helpful anyway. I did a userChrome.css thing a while back to make it just show favicons in the tab bar with one or two pixels of space and it works great. The tabs don't jump around when you switch tabs and you can fit a bunch more of them in the same space (I keep favicon bookmarks on the right side of the tab bar).
        • RussianCow 8y ago
          This is useless for sites that don't have favicons.
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Odd, Firefox 65 already appears to do this under Gnome, unless I'm misunderstanding. Could be that Ubuntu were already doing this and it has now made it upstream, I suppose.
    • Brakenshire 8y ago
      I think it was behind a flag before.
    • jcranberry 8y ago
      I believe it's non-default behavior. There's a keyboard shortcut to hide it.
• davnicwil 8y ago
  So what's the list of browsers now that have autoplaying blocked or have that feature planned?
  • mental1896 8y ago
    I've started to make a list: - Firefox -
    • ucha 8y ago
      Safari does that too. https://www.howtogeek.com/326532/safari-now-disables-auto-playing-videos.-heres-how-to-allow-them-for-certain-sites/ https://www.howtogeek.com/326532/safari-now-disables-auto-pl...
    • swiley 8y ago
      Elinks and dillo have autoplay blocked :p
    • andyn 8y ago
      Chrome won't autoplay videos having audio. Unless you've already interacted with the site.
    • tsukurimashou 8y ago
      Lynx :^)
      • swebs 8y ago
        w3m
  • wojciechpolak 8y ago
    Safari has it and is doing it much better, because it blocks both video and audio autoplay. I just tested it on Firefox 66 and I'm very disappointed. It blocks only audio and... it's broken anyway. On one page the first video was audio muted (great!), but then the second video came after the first one finished playing and it was suddenly unmuted! The tab was inactive and suddenly the sound came from it. Until fixed, I'm still going to use Safari for this solely reason.
• DeusExMachina 8y ago
  > Added basic support for macOS Touch Bar This was actually one of my major annoyances, since I use this feature often. I'm glad they added it, chances are others use it too.
  • duxup 8y ago
    Silly question... what do you do with Firefox and the touch bar?
    • liveoneggs 8y ago
      I use it to accidentally mute my computer and accidentally cancel loading web pages.
      • btashton 8y ago
        I use it to accidentally open Siri.
        • fnordsensei 8y ago
          I've removed the Siri button and put launchpad there instead. Somewhat less annoying. It's occurred to me that I should find out how to make a placebo button and put there, but I haven't prioritized it.
      • asark 8y ago
        I've had to remove a lot of the stuff from mine because, turns out, when I hit certain modifier'd key combos with my left hand I tend to rest my right ring finger at the top of one of the number keys... close enough to the touchbar to trigger it. Didn't know that about myself, but now I do, and I've had to clear out about half my touchbar to keep it from being a problem. Turns out if you press "play/pause" on there, it opens iTunes. Took me a while to figure out why that kept opening for "no reason".
        • liveoneggs 8y ago
• ekianjo 8y ago
  Looking at the news cycle, it seems like the amount of changes is pretty low for this new version. Are they using version numbers for marketing purposes now?
  • Tomte 8y ago
    They have time-based releases.
    • ekianjo 8y ago
      Ok I was not aware of that. Has it always been the case?
      • jve 8y ago
        Well more or less, except the time was 1 year or more for "major" releases. After Chrome went out and incremented major version with every release, firefox went after them. Chrome doesn't have super huge list of new features either. Anyway, here's the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history#Releas...
      • mruszczyk 8y ago
        Since 2011. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar
      • LukeShu 8y ago
        Since version 5 in 2011. For a while it was a monthly release, but since version 22/23 in June/August 2013 it's slowed down to every other month.
      • kevin_b_er 8y ago
        After chrome started a policy of version number inflation, firefox, firefox did the same for marketing reasons, else'd we'd be on like... version 6.6 instead of 66.0
• ddavis 8y ago
  On macOS: still waiting for interactions with the address bar to be smooth and fast. It's frustratingly laggy in my opinion. Does anyone else feel this way? For me it's the only reason I still gravitate towards Chrome on a Mac.
  • reticulated 8y ago
    Appears performant to me on a 2015 MBP. What's the use case in which you see problems?
  • xrisk 8y ago
    Have this same problem. 2015 rMBP. The FF UI feels so much more laggy than Chrome/Safari.
  • abrowne 8y ago
    AIUI, Mozilla is rewriting the address bar ("QuantumBar"), and you can now toggle it on in Nightly by setting browser.urlbar.quantumbar to true in about:config. I've only tried it on Linux, but it seems smoother.
    • Leace 8y ago
      Thanks for the pointer, the toggle works in stable too but the smoothness you describe just isn't there yet :)
    • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      When did the "Awesome Bar" become the "Quantum Bar", what's the difference, and why can't they call it the "address bar" (yes despite it being overloaded with other functions)?
      • abrowne 8y ago
        It's this rewrite specifically that's called QuantumBar.
  • elven_lord 8y ago
    have this exact same problem on my 2015 rMBP, switching between tabs quickly is hideous.
• jesse_m 8y ago
  Does this mean that custom emacs/vim keybindings can work again?
  • falsedan 8y ago
    I would expect those plugins to work once it's mentioned in the release notes
  • rudedogg 8y ago
    I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ and it works well for me.
    • jesse_m 8y ago
      I thought that when only web extension plugins were allowed shortcut extensions no longer worked. I was using keysnail. I was following https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 but didn't know if it had been resolved. Thanks I'll check that out
  • scns 8y ago
    Ceheck out saka keys
• Vinnl 8y ago
  > Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the top of the page That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.
  • kgwxd 8y ago
    Especially with the everything-below-the-fold-except-an-irrelevant-image trend.
  • freehunter 8y ago
    Wouldn't it be nice if browsers or servers could reserve that space even if it's not loaded? Like "this is going to be a 500x200 image so let's load 500x200 pixels worth of empty space until it's fully loaded" and avoid jumping.
    • onion2k 8y ago
      I think you're being sarcastic, but if not and for anyone who isn't aware, setting the width and height on an <img> tag (or it's associated style) will do this.
      • ezekg 8y ago
        This would be a great solution, if everybody used the same screen size.
        • onion2k 8y ago
          The width and height of an image set in a CSS file can be in any valid CSS unit. That's pixels, or em, or a percentage, or viewport units (vw and vh for 1% of the width or height, vmin or vmax for 1% of the shortest or longest side), or real world units like mm (only works on high DPI screens). Support varies. Eg setting an image to be "width: 100vw; height: 100vh;" means it'll be squished to fill the user's viewport. "width: 100vw; height: auto;" will fill the viewport horizontally and scale the image vertically as per it's aspect ratio. And so on. Generally that'll look bad though because browsers scale things fast rather than well. And then there's the options for background images. "background-size: cover" is quite useful. CSS is fun.
• karolist 8y ago
  I'm using Mac OS and the scroll using conventional optical mouse with segmented wheel is really jumpy basically in every other browser. Out of the Firefox, Chrome and Safari only FF scrolls a page really smooth, with no micro jumping as I turn the wheel. Anyone know how to fix this in other browsers?
  • StyloBill 8y ago
    I think that's what you're looking for: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smoothscroll/nbokbjkabcmbfdlbddjidfmibcpneigj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smoothscroll/nbokb...
  • jannes 8y ago
    I think it's just a question of which algorithm the browsers use to translate the mouse wheel input into an animation. The other browsers are probably mostly tested with Apple's high precision mouse/trackpad devices that report scroll distance in very small steps instead of the coarse distance reporting of standard mice.
  • rplnt 8y ago
    There's two things to this. One is an option usually called "smooth scrolling" which was historically disabled in Firefox or Chrome (and it was really annoying). It was an on/off switch that either animated the movement between two points in page or it just jumped. I believe all browsers have this enabled now. The second issue, what you are probably referring to is how the page is animated between those two points. Firefox now uses something old Opera used to have, a really gradual scroll. All chromium-based browser I just tried have this rather jumpy scroll. It's different, but it is not nearly as bad as it used to be in FF. In short, I don't know, but "smooth scrolling" is something you might want to search for.
• k_sze 8y ago
  Not sure if the tab search is entirely new or simply made more accessible in FF 66, but it certainly seems to make the All Tabs Helper add-on mostly obsolete for me now.
  • Woofles 8y ago
    In previous versions if you typed in the name of tab in the url bar it would offer you the option of a tab you already had open (on any of your computers using FF sync) among the search options.
  • dao- 8y ago
    The feature has been there for years, i.e. you could always enter a magic character to restrict awesomebar searches to tabs. Problem is, people didn't know the magic character, so hardly anybody used this feature. It's more accessible now.
• wy6psk 8y ago
  zzzzz
• clb4mf 8y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/mzmsdzt.png https://i.imgur.com/mzmsdzt.png They added this to my home page, despite the fact that my default search provider is DDG. Mozilla, could you STOP bundling advertisements into my browser?
  • swebs 8y ago
    To be fair, that's their entire business model outside of donations.
  • dao- 8y ago
    The default is the default and this UI doesn't change that. It allows you to have a default, yet still use the other engines on a one-off basis. It's not limited to google either, e.g. I believe amazon is offered by default as well.
  • kowdermeister 8y ago
    Do you donate to the foundation?
    • clb4mf 8y ago
      They kicked out Brendan so no.
• swebs 8y ago
  Whenever Firefox is automatically updated through my package manager, any open instances refuse to load any new pages or tabs until I restart Firefox . Needless to say, this is absolutely infuriating when I'm in the middle of something important. Does anyone know how to disable this feature?
  • RX14 8y ago
    It's not a feature and you can't disable it, previously it'd just crash. I think it's to do with the content workers being `exec`d from disk each time instead of forking from a master.
    • mixmastamyk 8y ago
      It's never crashed on unix for me after an update. Sounds like a Windows problem however.
      • vetinari 8y ago
        It used to crash under Linux, when you updated it while it was running, and then opened new window or a tab. Now it shows a message that you need to restart.
        • mixmastamyk 8y ago
          Has never crashed on update for me, at least that I can remember after ten years. I have seen the warning message, that arrived years ago however. I'll add the caveat that I typically restart my browser at least once a day, perhaps avoids the problem.
          • jeltz 8y ago
            I restart my browser at most once per week and Firefox has never crashed for me after an update. I do not doubt that there was a risk that it could happen, but it cannot have been that common unless I was very lucky.
• laszlokorte 8y ago
  Does anyone else have the problem that firefox denies acces to `navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition` even if the user clicks "allow"? I hoped it was fixed in the release but seems to be not the case.
  • ataylor32 8y ago
    I tried https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation_API#Geolocation_Live_Example https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation... in Firefox 66 on macOS and Windows. I got "Unable to retrieve your location" on macOS (though it worked in Chrome on macOS). It worked on Windows, though.
    • cpeterso 8y ago
      On macOS, does setting about:config "geo.provider.use_corelocation" = false and restarting Firefox fix the geolocation error? Firefox 65 or 66 recently changed from always using Google Location Service to first check the operating system's local location service (CoreLocation on macOS, which might have a local location cache for faster lookups). If disabling CoreLocation fixes the problem, you might look in macOS System Preferences for location permissions. The first time an application tries to use the local location service, macOS prompts the user to grant permission to the application. If you accidentally click "deny", then macOS will automatically deny all future Firefox location requests.
  • lizzard 8y ago
    I reported this as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536481 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536481 - please comment there if you have more information or if you want to follow the discussion.
• k_sze 8y ago
  This bit is also somewhat surprising/interesting: > Improved performance and reduced crash rates by [doubling web content loading processes from 4 to 8 [1] From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency. I think there's supposed to be a link to more explanation or the relevant ticket, but it looks like they forgot to actually add the link. Can somebody fill it in here?
  • xtreak29 8y ago
    http://www.erahm.org/2019/03/13/doubling-the-number-of-content-processes-in-firefox/ http://www.erahm.org/2019/03/13/doubling-the-number-of-conte...
    • onli 8y ago
      That does not really explain why it would be more stable, or did I miss it?
      • jamienicol 8y ago
        Increasing the number of processes decreases the number of tabs sharing each process. So if a process crashes it will bring down fewer tabs.
        • k_sze 8y ago
          That would mean smaller impact per crash, not fewer crashes though.
          • rebelwebmaster 8y ago
            Could reduce out-of-memory crashes if fewer sites are sharing the same process.
            • k_sze 8y ago
• thecleaner 8y ago
  Hey did anybody try the autoplay off feature with Twitter ? Videos in my feed still seem to be playing
• benol 8y ago
  Considering the recent "Spectre is here to stay" paper [1], can anyone comment on whether Firefox should be considered secure until the work on process-per-site lands (I believe they are working on it)? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178 https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178
  • hannob 8y ago
    > can anyone comment on whether Firefox should be considered secure until the work on process-per-site lands No and Yes. No, theoretically there could be spectre vulns. Practically we have seen zero spectre-based attacks in the wild. It's not a big deal.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • pcwalton 8y ago
    We don't see Spectre vulnerabilities in the wild, and in any case Firefox has mitigations for it such as lowering timer resolution. The ongoing Fission work is basically defense in depth against future potential Spectre-like vulnerabilities.
• jorvi 8y ago
  I wish they made the macOS version more of a priority. There are two bugs in Bugzilla (window doesn't use CoreAnimation[1], h264/video isn't properly accelerated since quantum[2]) that together cut battery life in half compared to using Chrome or Safari. These have been in there for two years (!) and have varingly been either priority 2 or fix-optional (!!). I understand that there are limited resources but making your browser nigh unusable for on-the-go should mean these bugs get priority 1 or priority critical. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1400787#c4 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1400787#c4
  • mbrumlow 8y ago
    No. Linux should always be the priority!! Let the war begin!!
• Leace 8y ago
  I wonder how was the Wayland support improved. I'm running Firefox 65 with GTK_BACKEND=wayland and it works quite well but there are still some minor issues where and there.
• sercand 8y ago
  I have been using Firefox on macOS for a while but firefox is not well-integrated with the OS. Scrolling, downloading files, playing video/audio and many more have different convention from Safari/Chrome. Also, I am trying to avoid using Firefox on battery because it is a killer.
  • xattt 8y ago
    I’ve commented about this before, specifically about Firefox on OS X, but the sentiment seems to be that “you’re using it wrong”.
    • ASalazarMX 8y ago
      Truly in the Steve Jobs spirit.
    • clb4mf 8y ago
      Some (most?) people have no eye for design and simply don't notice stuff like that. Until recently Firefox's URL bar had a THICK blue glow when it was in focus, instead of the more subtle one the rest of Mac OS has. It infuriated me. They didn't fix it for years. Why? Because nobody noticed it or cared enough, I guess.
      • calcifer 8y ago
        > It infuriated me. They didn't fix it for years. "They didn't fix it" implies someone reported it as a bug. Even if no one did, if you were infuriated by it, surely you did, right?
        • xattt 8y ago
          It’s an art to craft a bug report convincing enough to address the issue.
  • yogthos 8y ago
    I've been using FF on macOS for the past year and haven't noticed any problems with the battery. I'm not sure what the problems are with scrolling, downloading, or playing media are either to be honest.
• fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Firefox has so many great features and yet I find myself not using it as my main browser for a simple reason: New windows open twice as fast in Safari and Chrome. I'm opening a lot of windows because I'm not a fan of tabs. So Firefox feels extremely sluggish to me even though the actual rendering and JavaScript execution is anything but sluggish. I'm not even sure if Firefox windows open so slowly for a reason or if it's just a really badly designed animation.
• fimdomeio 8y ago
  From the last 3 or so versions Firefox performance on my retina mac is indistinguishable from chrome (from a humam perspective not looking at ram cpu usage), so I'm very happy to be using firefox full time once again. At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. Does not happen any more.
  • Sharlin 8y ago
    > At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
    • bzbarsky 8y ago
      The "plugin-container" executable is used for all sandboxed processes on Windows. That started out as plug-ins, but now includes web renderers. So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs. It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users.... On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
      • Sharlin 8y ago
        Oh, my experience was on Mac like the GP’s. Edited to clarify. On Windows or Linux I haven’t encountered a similar 100% CPU use problem, which has led me to suspect it’s specifically the Mac version of some plugin that’s the problem.
        • bzbarsky 8y ago
• jessemillar 8y ago
  > With this update, Firefox is introducing scroll anchoring, which ensures that you’re not going to bounce around on the page as these slow-loading ads load. While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
  • mstade 8y ago
    > I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature. This has been my #1 gripe with web sites since pretty much the dawn of time. Finally!
  • brink 8y ago
    Same. Have you ever tried to click a link only to accidentally click something else because the page won't stop loading? It's infuriating.
    • itchyjunk 8y ago
      Do you mean like this? [0] [0] https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY
      • brownbat 8y ago
        That whole series provided some great anti-patterns: https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA
    • mushufasa 8y ago
      this has been happening to me recently on Google search, as cards load with info about the top results. Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load. Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.
      • jordwest 8y ago
• diminish 8y ago
  At the end unless Firefox doesn't block JavaScript, it won't have much effect. Actually it's also time to ban JavaScript after horrendous front end frameworks made simple page loads slow, energy and time consuming.
  • tehlike 8y ago
    That is the most pessimist comment on this thread. Javascript is useful, it is just a shame most people dont use it for good.
    • anoncake 8y ago
      We cant ban just the bad Javascript, a browser cannot distinguish it from the good. And overall, Javascript does more harm than good.
      • dymk 8y ago
        We'll probably just have to agree to disagree re: "JS does more harm than good". I have at least 5 progressive webapps open right now, none of which could work without javascript. Of the other 20 websites I have open in other tabs, none are being annoying or aggressive, and I'm not even using an adblocker.
        • anoncake 8y ago
          They could be proper applications instead.
          • dymk 8y ago
            Not really. It's way harder (and therefore the barrier is higher, they'd be less likely to exist, etc) to develop cross platform native applications than it is to just implement them as webapps. If it was just as easy to write and distribute native applications, we'd be doing that, instead of bolting it onto the web. But it's pretty clearly not.
• vernie 8y ago
  Didn't the whole creative coding community pitch a fit when Chrome did this?
  • JoshTriplett 8y ago
    Because Chrome had bugs in how it worked, and didn't make it trivial for people to re-enable when they want audio.
    • seba_dos1 8y ago
      I wouldn't say "bugs". It was deliberate behavior. Chrome simply broke a lot of content on the Web, while Firefox just mutes it and lets you unmute.
• seanwilson 8y ago
  > Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the top of the page How well does this work in practice?
• rc_kas 8y ago
  Firefox : The hero the world does not deserve
  • Longhanks 8y ago
    But desperately needs.
• superkuh 8y ago
  Firefox also automatically blocks users from installing or editing their own add-ons.
  • StavrosK 8y ago
    I have never seen this, so citation needed.
    • dymk 8y ago
      I think the GP is referring to not being able to install non-signed add-ons in non-developer versions of Firefox.
      • superkuh 8y ago
        Yes. You have to have mozilla sign your add-ons after every little edit you make or use the beta/dev with bugs.
      • StavrosK 8y ago
        I don't know, my non-dev version has an "install addon from file" menu item.
        • anoncake 8y ago
          Are you sure Firefox doesnt check the signature if you use that menu item?
          • StavrosK 8y ago
            I'm pretty sure, as I haven't signed my extensions before loading them.
  • 51lver 8y ago
    I too find this to be a hostile action against the user. It's my computer.
• an4rchy 8y ago
  Does this include Netflix? It's been getting really annoying to have random videos your mouse is on, as you scroll, start playing automatically.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Indeed, the autoplay feature of Netflix is insanely intrusive. How are you supposed to let menus sit while you do something else, or even just read details.
    • StavrosK 8y ago
      I noticed something that struck me as an extremely dark pattern the other day. I was in the Netflix menu on my TV, and I loaded a show and was hovering over the "play" button, but figured I'd leave it there and not start it yet. A few seconds later, the video fades in and the episode starts playing! I didn't even notice it and kind of started watching the episode, but then realized that I hadn't actually started it myself! Netflix almost roped me into watching an episode even though I didn't explicitly ask them to, and that seems very manipulative to me.
      • giggles_giggles 8y ago
        This only just started happening? I use a PS4 to watch Netflix and the auto-play has been happening for months. I find it so irritating that now I don't go to Netflix to browse anymore, because I don't have long enough to consider an option before it involuntarily begins happening to me. Now I only open the interface if I already know what I want to watch, which means I'm no longer exposed to anything new they add. That single feature has single-handedly driven me into being almost entirely a Hulu watcher, because I can browse their app and not be blasted by whatever the algorithm wants to force on me. If my fiance didn't watch a number of Netflix Originals specifically, I would've cancelled my account by now, and not out of principle or something, just because I cannot stand the autoplay interface. It's completely killed Netflix for me. I used to go to Netflix by default to browse, when I didn't know what I wanted to watch. Not anymore..
• amelius 8y ago
  Why not just block the audio by default? I don't care about the video, because any hostile website could still generate video by using gifs, or by playing a sequence of image frames using JavaScript.
  • maxaf 8y ago
    Video tends to eat deeply into the metered data plans of many Internet users.
    • woogley 8y ago
      the alternatives (gifs, frames advanced by JS) are even more bandwidth-heavy
      • Marsymars 8y ago
        If sites escalate to gifs or frames advanced by JS, I'll escalate to blocking gifs or JS. Autoplaying video is not acceptable.
        • maxaf 8y ago
          I like what Slack does for GIFs: there's some (not sure if configurable) size threshold above which the GIF won't auto-expand. This is something browsers could do in general.
          • cesarb 8y ago
            That assumes the browser can know the image's content-length before loading the whole image, which unfortunately isn't always possible.
            • maxaf 8y ago
              Yeah, that's fair, but is likely a corner case. How often do you see a finitely sized resource that doesn't get returned with a Content-Length response header? If push came to shove, a browser could simply stop reading & close the connection after consuming a certain number of bytes. GIFs are sequential things anyway, aren't they? I don't remember that detail.
• xparco 8y ago
  Can't wait for Firefox to die...pretentious group. After they turned vile on how they treated the older CEO it's been downhill
• skrebbel 8y ago
  My company makes pluggable chat software. I'm sad about this development, because it means that we can't audibly notify users anymore when someone writes a message to them. I wonder whether there's a way around that, but I don't see it.
  • devit 8y ago
    You are supposed to use the Web Notifications API and let the browser/OS choose whether it should play a sound.
    • skrebbel 8y ago
      Many browsers don't play a sound when a notification is shown.
  • GrinningFool 8y ago
    What about using the notifications API? Seems a cleaner way than autoplaying sound in any case. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notifications_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...
  • droobles 8y ago
    I've been messing around with the Web Audio API lately and the message Firefox leaves is that it will still work as long as the user initiates the sounds loading, not the page. So if the user opens your chat or maybe interacts with your page in a way that indicates they've given you permission to play sounds then you're good.
    • jeltz 8y ago
      That is a bit annoying for my usecase (playing a sound whenever a team scores a goal) where the users enable it manually but it is remembered with a cookie. Right now we just do not remember their sound preferences in Safari, which just like Firefox requires user interaction. So some responsible users are affected by this change, but it is also a necessary change due to too many abusers. This is why we cannot have nice things.
• jordan_ 8y ago
  but how is there still no pinch-to-zoom on mac?
• Aardwolf 8y ago
  Is there a whitelist though? Because while I dislike an unexpected video autoplaying in a news article, there are sites where I want and expect a video to start without pressing anything, such as Youtube
  • Someone1234 8y ago
    Yes. Options -> Privacy & Security -> Block Websites from automatically playing sound -> Exceptions (Allow/Block)
  • pard68 8y ago
    The little (i) in the top left of the address bar, then under permissions click allow. The article has a screen shot and details on this
• syntaxing 8y ago
  Finally! Please roll this out to Firefox Android!
• ancorevard 8y ago
  Is this any different that what Safari has been doing?
  • Longhanks 8y ago
    No, but it’s available one Windows and Linux.
  • wojciechpolak 8y ago
    Yes, it's different - it only mutes audio and video is still autoplaying. Safari blocks both audio and video.
• pluc 8y ago
  Gotta love the constant battle between marketing and common sense. We implement something, marketing learns of it, abuses it, we tweak or kill the thing into a pale shadow of its former self. This is also why we can't have nice things by the way.
• fxfan 8y ago
  Now please ship ublock origin by default.
  • 0xffff2 8y ago
    Why? What would be better about uBlock Origin if it was integrated? Furthermore, it wasn't that long ago that we all used AdBlock Plus, and then uBlock. If we integrate the current flavor of ad blocker, what happens when we want/need to move to something else?
• rosege 8y ago
  This it's great and I'm looking forward to trying it. I'm currently in Europe and every webpage now pops up a message about using cookies. If they could work out a way to say accept to all these automatically too that would be awesome as well.
  • dorgo 8y ago
    There is an addon for firefox: "i don't care about cookies" which removes such popups. I think it works well, because I can't remember cookie-popups on desktop.
    • the_pwner224 8y ago
      The IDCAC extension just has a filter list for cookie popups and removes them the same way that ad blockers do. In the uBlock Origin settings you can go to the 'Filter lists' tab and enable more filter lists, including ones that delete cookie popups. Here are a few good ones: Built In => uBlock filters - I have enabled all except experimental Ads => Adblock Warning Removal List (messages asking you to disable adblocker) Annoyances => Fanboy's Cookie, Annoyance, and Social Blocking Lists (social blocking deletes like/share buttons)
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• darkstar999 8y ago
  I've switched over to Firefox on all devices. It's especially useful on Android because I can use uBlock and other useful extensions, where Chrome doesn't have any. The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit tab, and then type in a search query.
  • numbers 8y ago
    I'm on iOS using firefox and I had no idea you can install extensions on the Android version of firefox, that's very cool!
  • toflon 8y ago
    I know it's not the same, but if you bookmark "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" and put in a keyword like "yt". You can type "yt whatever" in the addressbar and it will do a search on youtube.
    • Zren 8y ago
      You can also use https://www.reddit.com/r/%S https://www.reddit.com/r/%S with a capital `%S` to avoid escaping the slashes, so you can type "r all/top" or with GitHub "g Zren/reponame"
      • remram 8y ago
        This is exactly what I needed. I set up this exact shortcut years ago, in Chrome, and have been slightly annoyed for months that "r sub/top" didn't work on Firefox. Thank you stranger.
    • Vinnl 8y ago
      And if you set DuckDuckGo or Qwant or a different search engine that supports !bangs as your default search engine, you can use those in your address bar - so no need to configure !yt, !w, !s etc manually.
• acheron 8y ago
  This should help for a few months, and then web developers will come up with some other terrible anti-pattern, and we will need yet another line of defense.
• jimmaswell 8y ago
  Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is left but plain text and ads, to thunderous applause. Gross overreaction after gross overreaction and now we're in a state where extensions are a shallow husk of their former glory, you need to jump through legally vague ridiculous hoops to do anything involving user data, a vast trove of great Flash content is no longer accessible to the average user, web apps with sound and video aren't allowed to work seamlessly without an obnoxious "click here to let the webpage do what it should be able to do anyway" button, and various other unnecessary restrictions. How soon until it's the default that you need to give a website permission to display images and you need a license to make a webpage? That's the direction it feels like we're heading in. I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me, but at least I was alive for it. I went over the subject here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332
  • benj111 8y ago
    Staying on the subject at hand, do you not find it annoying trying to find which tab, and where on the tab a video is playing? "I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me" Funny, I'd place the golden age before all these things you cite. Out of curiosity what's your favourite website, what most sums up your golden age?
    • jimmaswell 8y ago
      I'm not sure if I'd call it my favorite anymore but I probably use reddit the most. I'm thinking of golden age in terms of the power available to webpages/browsers. This would be when HTML5/webgl/etc features had just gotten implemented, plugins like Flash and Java were still supported, and Firefox used the old extension system. All of the old web was still there alongside the cool new stuff. Now the old stuff is gone and the new stuff is getting ruined.
      • benj111 8y ago
        Reddit, I can see that. Would you want a reddit where every embedded video in a thread auto played though? I'm guessing our disagreement is over who has final say over display of content? I would say the client, you would say the server (or creator)? Is that fair?
• jimmaswell 8y ago
  Reposting from the other thread: Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is left but plain text and ads, to thunderous applause. Gross overreaction after gross overreaction and now we're in a state where extensions are a shallow husk of their former glory, you need to jump through legally vague ridiculous hoops to do anything involving user data, a vast trove of great Flash content is no longer accessible to the average user, web apps with sound and video aren't allowed to work seamlessly without an obnoxious "click here to let the webpage do what it should be able to do anyway" button, and various other unnecessary restrictions. How soon until it's the default that you need to give a website permission to display images and you need a license to make a webpage? That's the direction it feels like we're heading in. I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me, but at least I was alive for it. I went over the subject here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332
  • mediaman 8y ago
    You're advocating for auto-playing videos and sound, proprietary resource-gobbling flash content, and the nonconsensual abuse of user data? Yes, what a golden age that was. It is a much more persuasive argument that the new controls are simply a reaction to bad actors who corrupted the value the original web provided. Sure, when the internet was a smaller village, nobody needed to lock their door: but then the village turned into the city, and locks became necessary. It seems strange to blame the locks for the reason they are needed.
    • jimmaswell 8y ago
      I find GDPR overreaching enough to be worse than its absence.
      • angus-prune 8y ago
        What negative impacts have you seen from GDPR?
  • dec0dedab0de 8y ago
• OrgNet 8y ago
  They should also block sites that load data from more then 3 sources ... that would almost be the whole web... too bad mozilla doesnt have a large market share anymore...
• dang 8y ago
  Url changed from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/66.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/66.0/releasenotes/ to the blog post about the release. Another article on this: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/firefox-now-automatically-blocks-autoplaying-audio-and-video/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/firefox-now-automatically-..., deduped from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432362.
• rammy1234 8y ago
  "Lowered priority of setTimeout and setInterval during page load to improve overall page load performance" , how will this improve performane? im askin to learn .
• vinay_ys 8y ago
  These are the features still on my wishlist: - First-class portable password manager and built-in support for pkcs11 SC - security device that's not buggy, - fingerprinting protection, - first party isolation, - default fonts, - better zoom behavior, - built-in ublock origin ad-blocker.
• sterlind 8y ago
  Oh thank God, Windows hello support. I had to give up Firefox at work because all our sites authenticate via Hello. Now I can kick Chrome to the curb.
• riquito 8y ago
  > The min-content and max-content keywords are now available unprefixed very good, thanks for the hard work!
• ackfoo 8y ago
  Why does it only block videos with sound? I would like one prominent check box in the settings that says, "Never, ever auto-play videos. Ever." I cannot imagine thinking, "You know what this site needs? A video that starts playing by itself!"
• 51lver 8y ago
  I'd like the option to disable checking for updates back, please.
• OrgNet 8y ago
  Its a bit late for this .... not sure if it will make any difference... the people still using firefox are using addons to do that... but sure its a step in the right direction
  • cgb223 8y ago
    Is it? Chrome is moving more and more towards controling their browser experience, and monetizing their existing web properties (example, there are now ads in the Gmail iOS App) Apple is focusing more and more on privacy, especially for Safari.This is the best way that can fight back against Google's market share. They've definitely done their market research, so Firefox doing the same is probably in step with market needs. I think longer term this is going to pay off big for Firefox
  • RussianCow 8y ago
    We need to eradicate this myth that only power users use Firefox anymore. There are plenty of laypeople still using it that never switched to Chrome, or recently switched to Firefox for privacy or other reasons, and those people generally don't use many addons (if any at all) or change the settings from the defaults. I don't know what the actual percentage is, but I'm sure Mozilla knows the answer, and I'd be willing to bet that it's much more than half.
    • burtonator 8y ago
      So far I'm seeing very few people using my app in Firefox... they're mostly chrome. By about 80%... and a ton are from Hacker News... Makes it hard to justify coding for Firefox but I'm trying.
      • pacifika 8y ago
        RIP IE6
    • geofft 8y ago
      The nice thing is that Mozilla makes this data easily available. You can see from the "Latest Version" graph on https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity that a) about 75% of Firefox users are getting updates to the latest version and b) that number did not appear to change with the release of Firefox 57. So there are approximately zero users staying on pre-Quantum versions of Firefox. (Perhaps there are users of Pale Moon or other pre-Quantum forks?)
• fedups 8y ago
  > Searching within Multiple Tabs – Did you know that if you enter a ‘%’ in your Awesome Bar, you can search the tabs on your computer? This will be a big help for me. Makes me wonder how many more there are that are just too cumbersome to discover.
  • mklein994 8y ago
    I always forget them, so I have this bookmarked: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-firefox-bookmarks-history-tabs#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... TL;DR: Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs. Add # to search for matches in page titles. Add $ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs). Add ? to search for matches in suggestions.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    You know the other modifiers for history (^), favourites (*), and tag search (+), page title (#), url($), and suggestions (?) too. I use the first 3, they compound too (in a slightly strange way, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-firefox-bookmarks-history-tabs https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire..., see last few paras.).
    • nh2 8y ago
      After wondering why this doesn't work: It's important that you type them AFTER the thing to search for, not before. For example, `mytag +` instead of `+ mytag`. I found that quite surprising.
      • rhizome 8y ago
        Reverse Mozilla Notation
  • SilasX 8y ago
    What would be even better is if they let me add arbitrary keyboard shortcuts that don't need to wait until the document has loaded, like they did up to 2016.
• undoware 8y ago
  Could someone in the know please dilate on this claim? "Fixed: <button> element is no longer special cased in event dispatch, per latest specifications"
  • heycam 8y ago
    It's probably referring to this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1089326 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1089326
• revskill 8y ago
  My online annoyances mostly come from having too many open tabs. That's why i use a Chrome add-on (Great Suspender) to automatically kill inactive tabs, which killed my RAM in a long run.
• moogly 8y ago
  [this thread is not for bug reports; sorry everyone]
  • pjc50 8y ago
    What? I missed that in the release notes.
    • Flavius 8y ago
      Don't worry, you can still move/reorder/detach tabs.
    • moogly 8y ago
      Just a bug for me, it's not on purpose.
  • acdha 8y ago
    This isn't true on a normal install. Do you have any addons which alter the tab behaviour?
• tzhenghao 8y ago
  I think the core problem is still tab clutter. Every time I hop onto my iPad to do some light browsing, I have less anxiety. I don't keep many tabs open on mobile/tablet, but I'm already counting 8 opened here as I'm typing on my laptop. Sure, almost everything mentioned in the article is problematic. Then again, maybe it's just us programmed to hit Ctrl-T too much over a decade...
  • cube2222 8y ago
    Heh, I've got the exact opposite problem. On the desktop I manage to have "only" 10-40 tabs open at the same time, but on mobile it's usually 200-300. I just open new tabs whenever I think something might be worth reading, but only have time every now and then to actually read part of the stack.
  • basch 8y ago
    There needs to be a complete overhaul of "how i got here, back/forward, where i want to go, things i want to read, things i want to flip between, things i want cached so when i click they dont load, i want to purge the tab from my current workspace, i want to purge this site from the history." Navigation (forward/back), history, tabs, bookmarks et all are all trying to do various forms of the same thing, and their overall relationship to each other is fundamentally broken, because each individual component is too rigidly defined and isolated. I should be able to click between a couple buttons to see how tabs are 1) related to each other from a time/clicked/navigation history perspective 2) workspace perspective 3) topic perspective
    • PaulHoule 8y ago
      Even in current browsers you can do pretty well closing tabs whenever you want and looking them up in history. The situation could be way better.
      • basch 8y ago
        Except in chrome for example, where history clears after so many days, so you have to bookmark. Firefox had some experiment that merged a visual history with tabs, I didnt like the idea at all, but at least they were thinking about change.
• jordanpg 8y ago
  Still does not block autoplay on cnn.com, which is my acid test for this. UPDATE: Yes it does, but it's not enabled by default. (?)
  • r3bl 8y ago
    It's not enabled by default immediately, but I've heard it will be in less than a week.
  • pard68 8y ago
    Blog said next week, unless you're running dev or nightly
• YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  please add 'pull down to reload' feature on android browser
  • RussianCow 8y ago
    Please don't. Otherwise I'm going to end up accidentally reloading many pages. :)
• SpaceManNabs 8y ago
  Honestly, Reader Mode, in built ad blocker, tree tabs, and containers make Firefox so streamlined for me. I think that Google sites must not be thoroughly tested on firefox though! Vanilla Gmail (no add-ons or theme, but not the basic HTML version) isn't too fast. Not as fast as it used to be a year ago on Chrome either, but not as bad as FF.
  • make3 8y ago
    or bad on purpose. chrome doesn't let you block ads on mobile after all, and Google is an ad company.
  • krageon 8y ago
    I haven't tried this with gmail yet, but I know that if you use a user agent switcher on the google search page to set your useragent to chrome the search page will have more features (summaries, etc). This is especially noticeable on mobile, where Chrome will have a ton more legibility (IMO) unless you do this. It's always been a little surprising that this isn't grounds for a huge fine, but apparently they get away with it by saying something vague and corporate like "we can't be sure this works".
• arwineap 8y ago
  I would love a browser, or extension that would prevent sites from hijacking or munging my clipboard. It's infuriating that a page can dictate what gets placed in my clipboard against my will.
  • codazoda 8y ago
    I use Firefox and I've never noticed this. On Google Docs, when you use the copy menu, it suggests that you use the keystroke combination, making me think it's unable to copy via JS. I haven't tested it specifically but I think FF already does this.
  • driverdan 8y ago
    There's a setting in about:config to turn it off. The problem is that it messes up copying text in some tools like Google Docs and Sheets. Even if you turn it off Google hijacks the shortcut keys and right click. For some reason selecting Copy from the Edit menu doesn't work either.
    • codazoda 8y ago
      Do you know what the option is called?
      • ilikejam 8y ago
        dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
• OscarTheGrinch 8y ago
  Firefox needs to be the browser OF something, something super simple: privacy, security, convenience, etc. "Reduce Your Online Annoyances" is a bit of a mouthful. Being the browser of "Support Us Or Google Will Own Everything" is likewise not compelling for the vast majority of users. Firefox has the functionality, now it needs to cement its narrative.
  • bertil 8y ago
    “Firefox, the browser without shitware”?
    • clb4mf 8y ago
      They run ads on the front page and install addons remotely into their users' computers. They are everything but "without shitware".
      • pard68 8y ago
        Huh? Examples or some sources would be appreciated.
    • tgragnato 8y ago
      A start page without my bookmarks... "main websites" and "in evidence" https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1185996 https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1185996 https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1185347 https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1185347
  • rdiddly 8y ago
    Well it's obvious they're positioned to be the browser "of privacy," but they could probably stand to hype that a bit more.
  • snaky 8y ago
    Saying it's the browser that brings "No-ads experience to your Android smartphone" would be pretty powerful message to get a share on average users market.
• bobbyi_settv 8y ago
  I love that we continue to refer to private/ incognito browsing as something mainly used "when you’re planning a surprise party or gift".
  • rdiddly 8y ago
    thought bubble: "Heyy, you could use porn mode for that!"
  • derefr 8y ago
    I use Incognito mainly to let my friends log into their accounts for a minute on my computer, if they desperately need to e.g. make a bank transaction or an Amazon purchase or something using some combination of my information and theirs, where I can type stuff in (e.g. my shipping address) and they can type stuff in (e.g. their login credentials.) Porn browsing, meanwhile, is much better done with a secondary dedicated Chrome profile.
    • meruru 8y ago
      Probably a better idea to use `firefox --ProfileManager` for that. That way you don't risk exposing your bookmarks, history, active logins, etc
      • derefr 8y ago
        Chrome profiles don't require you to log into them. They pop up a login prompt on the welcome screen, but you don't have to use it. I would recommend actually using it, though—with a dedicated porn-browsing Google Account, that you created once upon a time in an internet cafe, using Mailinator or the like as the recovery email. After all, nothing gets people to keep digging more than a layer of anonymity; and nothing gets people to stop digging more than finding what seems to be a real person who "uses" a bunch of services like Google, Facebook, etc. all with the same email.
  • meruru 8y ago
    It's slightly amusing, but it's sad that we still have to act taboo around sexual subjects.
• 14 8y ago
  I love the page anchoring there is nothing more annoying, imo, then page jumping. More so on mobile but still am glad to see this addressed. I always felt like it was intentional on mobile, timed perfectly to when the average user would be expected to click the certain location then bam an ad pops up in it's place. Good riddance.
• Causality1 8y ago
  One of my primary online annoyances is having to maintain two Firefox installations because most of my favored extensions can't or won't be rewritten for WebExtensions and I find the practice of forcing users to keep currently open tabs above the bookmarks bar contemptuous.
• cyxxon 8y ago
  One web annoyance I have recently discovered is moving the current tab. So far only one website I know uses it, but that is really annoying... when you click on specific links on that site, it suddenly moves the ative tab to the very right of all open tabs. I don't understand the reasoning there, but it made me ponder learning Firefox addon development several times already... or is something like that also easily fixed in Firefox?
• Jabbermonkey 8y ago
  If Firefox had treated TabMixPlus (TMP) and other extensions as first-class citizens when they introduced quantum, I can guarantee I'd be using Firefox today (along with all the less technical people in my extended network, who I'd install it for). Unfortunately, during the transition to quantum and WebExtensions the developers blocked add-ons making changes to the Firefox interface, which crippled TMP and a variety of other add-ons. To suddenly have your favorite add-on crippled is a little painful but what made me walk away was the tone of responses from Mozilla people on the boards and the bug reports. It ranged from dismissive, to arrogant, to angry which, particularly given how quickly the transition took place, just added insult to injury. It seemed like Mozilla did get the message by the end of 2017 that their approach and response to add-ons had alienated many users. One of their 2018 visions included a statement that 'In 2018, extensions will be one of the reasons why people choose and use Firefox.' Unfortunately, when I looked at the TMP message boards last year I still saw very little in the way of signs of cooperation and encouragement from Mozilla. The TMP developer, onemen, still seems to be trying his best to produce a suite of extensions to reproduce the lost functionality and to be fair to Mozilla they have been moving obstacles out of the way but the pace is glacial. Chrome may be creepy and invasive but right now it's far more flexible and remains a smoother experience. I'd really love to switch away from Chrome but I won't trade it for an inflexible Firefox UI. If Mozilla could loosen up on the UI restrictions, demonstrate that they're doing everything possible to make the product friendly for add-on developers, and somehow get themselves around to replicating, or helping to replicate, TMP and other crippled add-ons then I would enthusiastically consider switching.
  • throwaway2048 8y ago
    the chrome UI is vastly more restrictive than the Firefox one (addons effectively can not modify it in any way), so i'm not sure what you are saying here.
    • Jabbermonkey 8y ago
      Looks like the current target for feature parity with FF56 may be around 2020 or later, based on projected fixes of critical bugs. Toolbar: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215064 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215064 Session managers: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474130 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474130 It shouldn't take three plus years to fix an upgrade. The goal was good, WebExtensions are a significant step forward as a concept. Planning, execution and post-transition management sucked.
• copperx 8y ago
  This is a great update. However, it still doesn't fix the long-standing YouTube micro-stutters on Linux. I have to resort to using Chrome to watch any videos, and I have tried all the workarounds.
• lvturner 8y ago
  I want to see “disable websites asking to send you notifications on bu default” !
• nydel 8y ago
  excited to see some of these features in a future waterfox release; things like integrated Pocket are the most major annoyances to me.
  • pard68 8y ago
    You can turn that off, unless it's just the idea that is annoying can't turn that off I guess.
• mamon 8y ago
  When will they get rid of their own biggest annoyance, namely this "Firefox is installing updates and will start in a moment" popup? Why not install updates just before shutting down? Or be decent and ask user permission ?
• todd3834 8y ago
  If Firefox automatically got rid of cookie banners for me I’d consider switching back
  • jamienicol 8y ago
    This extension will do that for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...
• daniel_iversen 8y ago
  That’s all nice but is there any update on battery improvements? I can’t see any for a long time. That’s about the last reason left why I’m still using Chrome on Mac.
  • tgtweak 8y ago
    Edge spent a lot of time and focus on this but it seems Firefox is not actively pursuing it or marketing it. Been using Firefox nightly on Android and it's on par with chrome (even faster with ublock running since FF can run extensions on mobile), but the battery drain feels higher than with chrome.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• Jnr 8y ago
  Once Firefox will be able to handle https://theannoyingsite.com/ https://theannoyingsite.com/ properly, it will have achieved that. (I suggest opening the most annoying site in incognito mode.) I had to tweak my Firefox quite a lot to pass that "benchmark".