65 ms·

Firefox 72.0

• m_eiman 7y ago
  I just upgraded my iMac to Catalina, and noticed this rather serious issue with Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620 Basically if you have an external screen (possibly related to it being low-DPI and main screen being Retina), context menus don't work properly, if at all. It seems it got even worse in 72 than it was in 71 - now I'm not even getting a context menu in the wrong place, it's invisible (maybe off-screen?). Hopefully someone who works on Firefox can see this and fix it - it's making Firefox nearly unusable as is :(
  • w-m 7y ago
    Ah, that's this 20 year old bug, that predates Mac OS X, striking again: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572
  • Tagbert 7y ago
    Wow, that’s strange. I’m using a similar (but not identical MBP13) setup but I don’t see this happening. Of course :( I have had trouble with menu bar items where the pull-down menu will not appear on one screen but will appear on the other. That seems to be a Catalina bug.
• zamadatix 7y ago
  If this seems faster than normal it is. 72 is the first major version released on the new 4 week release cycle.
• grenoire 7y ago
  What's the criteria for FF bumping its major versions? Looks to me like these release announcements are getting much more frequent. Edit: Answered by zamadatix.
  • The_rationalist 7y ago
    And the changelog shorter and shorter. Not only can't they catch up, but the feature gap keeps increasing.
    • eitland 7y ago
      Compared to Chrome you mean?
    • close04 7y ago
      It's also good marketing for regular users. When Chrome introduced this versioning style every other software was stuck in minor versions for years. Regular users started assuming that Chrome must be better since it gets major versions constantly. I don't mind either option but I would love to see some sort of date based version in there, like Firefox 72 (20.01).
    • jeltz 7y ago
      The changelog is shorter because they have changed to a more frequent release schedule, to once every 4 weeks from once every 6-8 weeks. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/09/moving-firefox-to-a-faster-4-week-release-cycle/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/09/moving-firefox-to-a-faster...
  • jdlyga 7y ago
    They're moving to a monthly system. Continuous integration, continuous delivery I guess.
• otanriverdi 7y ago
  It's great to see Firefox improving constantly. Especially since Chrome is unusable on MacOS Catalina for many users atm.
  • kmlx 7y ago
    ? i'm using the latest macos and chrome. what exactly isn't supposed to be working? i also have firefox installed, but on macos firefox is mostly an alpha/unfinished release since years ago.
    • otanriverdi 7y ago
      Well I'm having both the smooth scrolling bug and the constant beach ball of death for 5 seconds issue on my macbook.
• yori 7y ago
  After the recent missteps by Chrome (mangling the display of URLs), I decided to switch to Firefox and DuckDuckGo a few months ago and I was pleasantly surprised at how fast Firefox is these days than what I found it to be 10 years ago. While I still consider DuckDuckGo to be in the "not bad" category, Firefox is in the "seriously awesome" category now. If you have been away from Firefox for a while like me, give it another shot. It won't disappoint you for sure.
  • oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
    Are you a devtools user? How do the Firefox ones compare? I speak as someone who originally switched to Chrome (having been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days!) specifically for the devtools — it's pretty much the biggest factor in my browser choice.
    • Siecje 7y ago
      I like Edit and resend in the Network tab. I don't know how to do that in Chromium.
    • mushufasa 7y ago
      I think Firefox is better in some areas, especially their CSS grid viewer. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspector/How_to/Examine_grid_layouts https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto... I'm also keen to checkout the new Replay feature. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/WebReplay https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...
    • sergiosgc 7y ago
      Better in some aspects, worse in others, the interface is different enough to create a bit of a transition barrier. You won't be worse off, it isn't a big effort to get used to FF devtools, but you must accept a learning curve if you want to switch.
      • digitarald 7y ago
• typon 7y ago
  The picture in picture is such a great feature. Thanks Firefox devs :)
  • emerongi 7y ago
    Agreed. I use it all the time. There is an issue where the video in the pop-up can be slightly "laggy" for some reason, not sure why that is. Otherwise great feature.
  • fishbacon 7y ago
    Picture in picture was a feature I didn't know I wanted all along. I often had a window open only playing a youtube video, having it be native to the browser and always on top is such a great feature.
    • whoopdedo 7y ago
      Open in new window. Resize window. Right-click title bar, select "Always on Top". App developers spend a lot of their time making up for the poor decisions of OS developers. A good window manager would give you tabs for free, PiP (aka an always-on-top window) for free, dark mode for free. Instead OS devs go overboard in simplifying things to the point that app devs have to pay the cost of delivering what users want.
      • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Win10 (the version I have at work) has removed "keep above" and made it application specific, OneNote has it, Word doesn't. It's crazy.
        • jamesgeck0 7y ago
          Windows has never had a universal "keep above" menu option.
      • mFixman 7y ago
        That's actually the issue. Most operating systems don't have the windowing capabilities of most Linux distributions. I'm stuck on a Mac, where I cannot always on top, hide the title bar, or alt-drag windows to move them.
• saturn_vk 7y ago
  It doesn't seem like you can set the pip window to be sticky across all desktops. That's unfortunate and a bit unusable
  • Siecje 7y ago
    What is the pip window?
    • adventured 7y ago
      Picture in picture window. It can create, for example, a pop-out video overlay, which can be moved around and resized. It then sits over top of the other content on the page (and remains over other tabs) and will remain fixed as you scroll down the page and similar. On a site like YouTube, you could pop the video out and proceed to scroll down and interact with comments while the video plays to the side or above. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-f...
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • mishac 7y ago
    What platform are you on? I am on Ubuntu+GNOME and I was able to right click on the pip window and set "Always on visible workspace" with no issue.
    • saturn_vk 7y ago
      Yep. On gnome you can set it. That doesn't appear to be the case on osx. And it seems that for PIP, being sticky should be the default. I'm currently keeping safari open just to have a pip sticky window of youtube.
  • Spivak 7y ago
    In GNOME you can right click the pip window and enable "Always on Visible Workspace" and "Always on Top" to get the same effect.
• kbutler 7y ago
  The new notification request behavior is great (speech bubble in URL bar, instead of a popup https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-requests/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-requests...). Much better than the ubiquitous popup asking if a site could give you popups...
• vrsfvwae5tbh 7y ago
  Interestingly the beta for 73.0 [1] includes NextDNS as a second choice for DNS over HTTPS providers as well as Cloudflare. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/
  • blinkingled 7y ago
    Beware though - NextDNS is good but their servers being hosted in France the geolocation gets you IPs in france (when accessing Google properties for example) which slows things down a lot - 30-50ms vs 130+ in my case. They should have thought about this - it is possible to force resolve the individual domains in the NextDNS UI but that gets problematic fast.
    • CrendKing 7y ago
      Did you create your personal configuration? When you do, their server should be detecting the geolocation of your IP and assign the nearest ones (what you see at "DNS Servers") to that configuration like how CDN works. You can also check the assigned region at https://ipv4.dns.nextdns.io/ping https://ipv4.dns.nextdns.io/ping.
      • blinkingled 7y ago
        I did create a personal config. The ping says vultr-ewr-1, not sure what that means. Thanks.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    How do I make sure that Mozilla is respecting my OS DNS settings and not using DNS over HTTPS at all?
    • DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https#w_manually-enabling-and-disabling-dns-over-https https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https#... edit: there is also the canary domain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21825443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21825443
• alf-pogz 7y ago
  I use the Brave browser now, and I have no interest in going back to Firefox or Chrome at this point.
  • Jaygles 7y ago
    Care to elaborate why?
  • justusthane 7y ago
    Good for you. I prefer to use a browser not based on Chromium.
  • me_me_me 7y ago
    yes
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    That’s so “brave” of you. Tell us more? Should we invest in Bitcoin?
• meerita 7y ago
  My favorite browser since 2017. I don't miss Chrome for anything.
  • giancarlostoro 7y ago
    My favorite since the 2000's (idk when I started using it, mom didnt let me install it on the home computer for ages) I tried Chrome earlier on but (and I've said this on HN before) it didnt have adblock, then when it did, it was crippled. I never went back.
    • zamadatix 7y ago
      Chrome still hasn't pushed Manifest v3, it's using the exact same web block extension APIs as Firefox right now.
      • Vinnl 7y ago
        It decrippled it later, but initially, adblockers in Chrome could only hide ads, not prevent them from loading.
    • meerita 7y ago
      I used it since the betas. I'm early Mozilla user too. But I quit using it when Google Chrome shipped its first beta. Then, it was matter of time I started to use it. Remember FF was so slow between 2008-2015.
  • zamadatix 7y ago
    I really wish they'd add HDR support so my monitor would stop flickering but other than that I don't really miss much else from Chrome. Maybe the audio being better on sped up videos but that's about it.
    • padenot 7y ago
      You'll be happy to hear that we've recently dramatically improved the audio quality of sped up (and slowed down) videos, here is the ticket for the details: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267. This will be release in Firefox 73, in about 4 weeks (give or take a few days maybe). HDR is very much in the list of things we want to do (especially for videos), but as you can imagine, it's not particularly trivial, and will require platform specific work, and deep changes into Firefox. On the other hand, hardware is shipping (we got some devices so that developers can start assessing the situation), and HDR content is becoming increasingly available, so we're trying to figure out what it will take to do it properly.
• AdrianoKF 7y ago
  Can't wait to find out if this release fixes a bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160) that was preventing correct rendering of extension popup windows/context menus when the APZ zooming was enabled (which allows pinch-to-zoom gestures, e.g. on the MS Surface). Update: Just got to try it out, seems like it indeed works now. Yay Firefox 72!
  • zamadatix 7y ago
    Still open in 72.0 is the APZ bug where zooming out after zooming in results in the page being wider than the window.
  • vardump 7y ago
    Finally! Been waiting for functional pinch zooming on macOS and Windows for ages. Thank you Mozilla team!
• giancarlostoro 7y ago
  > Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more delightful experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer interrupt your browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the address bar when you interact with the site. This is fantastic! I had finally figured out I could turn this off in settings a while ago, glad it's now a default. I get so annoyed by this, annoying indeed!
  • megous 7y ago
    Well, it's delightfully stupid. In a webapp where you present user a button to activate notifiactions, when the user clicks the button seemingly nothing happens in FF72 (user is focussed on a big enable notifiactions button in the web app and may not notice that some tiny gray icon wiggled a little in the address bar). On a big screen a button in the middle of the screen is so far away from the address bar, that you don't see any change in the address bar at all in the peripheral vision. So yeah, web apps that don't try to force the user to enable notifications are now punished for good behavior again. EDIT: So it's not so stupid, see below.
    • krtkush 7y ago
      How about web apps too not show annoying pop-ups which are pretty useless in most cases? Websites which show two pop-ups (custom pop-up followed by browser pop-up) are worse.
      • megous 7y ago
        My website doesn't show any popups. I have a settings dialog that user can open and setup email and other notifications. This will just not work anymore. I'll have to add some long winded FF specific explanation on what to do after clicking the button. Anyway the FF UI is broken if user physically can't see any reaction from the browser after he requests notifications by clicking anywhere on the page.
        • johannh 7y ago
• harikb 7y ago
  What do people use for “Profiles”. I need ability to switch easily between profiles (different identities) without going to command line. I also don’t want to install a third party extension for that if possible
  • coldpie 7y ago
    Seems like you could create desktop shortcuts for this using the -P switch.
  • aspenmayer 7y ago
    https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
  • hijinks 7y ago
    use containers in FF instead. That was what got me to switch from Chrome years ago to FF. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
  • NaNtales 7y ago
    There's the first-party extension, Multi-Account Containers[1]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
  • thatcherc 7y ago
    Firefox has a Container Tabs extension which does just this - the defaults are profiles for Work, Personal, Banking, and Social, and you can add more. You do have to install it but I think the extension is from Mozilla itself, so it's not exactly third-party. It's just features that are already in the nightly builds as I understand it [0]. Personally I've really enjoyed it so far! [0] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
    • Vinnl 7y ago
• Twirrim 7y ago
  "Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more delightful experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer interrupt your browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the address bar when you interact with the site." That should pretty much kill off a lot of the notification request crap, especially if Chrome follows suit. I can envision the conversion rate massively falling off when it's no longer something right in your face.
  • hedora 7y ago
    Slack has started disabling unrelated features if you disallow notifications. For instance, you can’t add channels to the “ignore @here” list if notifications are off. I’m sure this’ll get worse over time. FF needs a “disable notifications, but lie to the website and say they’re enabled” button.
    • Nightshaxx 7y ago
      I feel like a good extension to make would be a lying extension. Make it able to lie to a site about any API and have set configurations to deal with specific types of behavior.
      • timlyo 7y ago
        Maybe even one that can randomise some settings to throw off fingerprinting.
    • daxelrod 7y ago
      I've seen sites that refuse to show you their content at all until you've enabled notifications. I like this lying idea.
      • zamalek 7y ago
        It should always lie. Consistently rejecting notifications is yet another bit for fingerprinting a user (not just a device).
• jdlyga 7y ago
  I keep trying Chrome out every so often, but there's little usability issues that keep bringing me back to Firefox. For example, Chrome never wants to bring me to the correct sites when you start typing letters. It's always a site I maybe visited once (like nypost instead of news.ycombinator.com)
  • dannyw 7y ago
    That's because one of Chrome team's KPIs is how many Google searches are performed through the Omnibar, and better tab search would decrease that KPI and decrease Google ad revenue. Think about it: it's a web browser literally built by the biggest search company in the world. The latest version of Chrome will even add Google Drive files to the omnibar search for G Suite users. There is no excuse that they have a worse omnnibox search than Firefox.
• nabergh 7y ago
  My biggest gripe with Firefox is how it opens tabs. If I open a new tab in Chrome, it opens just to the right of the current one which is nice because it keeps related tabs together. In Firefox it opens to the far right which is annoying. I tried installing an extension to fix this but it was buggy. Only recently did I discover that I could dig into about:config to enable the behavior I consider expected (and I'm sure most people agree with me given how many Chrome users there are).
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • 40four 7y ago
    I already updated to v.72 so I don't know if they changed the default, never really noticed before. But now browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent defaults to 'true'. I agree this is expected behavior :)
    • alimbada 7y ago
      FF71 - default is also true. Edit - default for this config variable could be platform specific; the above is based on Windows 10. I'll check on my MacBook tonight.
      • 40four 7y ago
        True, I am on Windows 10 as well. If anyone needs to change it though, that is the related setting to check in about:config.
    • jeltz 7y ago
      Damn, another option I need to change when I upgrade Firefox. :( I liked the old default. I think I will have to start writing a user.js.
    • megous 7y ago
      That only applies when you open a tab by clicking on a link. If you do ctrl+t, you'll get new tab at the far right.
• krbzsq 7y ago
  Okay, so I don't really post to HN and this may seem like a silly complaint but Firefox's management of theming just seems off to me. I use macOS, I don't fiddle about with my wallpaper very much and so this stains Firefox's top bar with an ugly brown tint. I could switch to the light theme, however when I do so Firefox no longer respects my system change to dark mode. Does anyone else get bothered by this? Is there any way around this? I'm not an aesthetics person by any means but this is quite annoying. It's a fantastic browser other than this, I've been a user for as long as I can remember. I'm sure you can probably modify userChrome and all this and I've not really tried because I'm not THAT bothered by it, but surely there should be a way to set your preferred themes for light & dark?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • zamadatix 7y ago
    If I'm reading your correctly you'd like to set FF to the light theme (or any theme) but continue to have dark mode pages? about:config browser.in-content.dark-mode true should do that.
    • DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      I highly recommend dark-reader: https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/
  • kevingadd 7y ago
    You could also try Firefox Color which provides customizable theming for Firefox, I've had good results with it https://color.firefox.com https://color.firefox.com
    • pvik 7y ago
      Firefox Color is great!! It lets me seamless blend firefox with my doom-themed i3wm and emacs. [1] https://imgur.com/a/t9tvbQr https://imgur.com/a/t9tvbQr [2] https://i.imgur.com/GXrTw7C.png https://i.imgur.com/GXrTw7C.png [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/9f29vr/i3_doom_colorscheme/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/9f29vr/i3_doom_co...
• abcd_f 7y ago
  Re: picture in picture - anyone else here think that this feature doesn't belong to a browser? It just seems so... erm... random, basically. Looks like something that was cloned from some other product and rather crudely shoehorned in. At the very least it should have been introduced after an update and given an option to opt-in to using it, rather than automatically enabling it without any notice.
  • jvzr 7y ago
    I love it and use it multiple (25+) times per day. My only wish is that it kept the interface from whichever player the videos comes from (eg. YouTube's, Netflix's, etc., especially for subtitles & platform-specific controls like Speed)
    • szatkus 7y ago
      That would be a tough one. There's no information which part of HTML is controls. Maybe they may hardcode this information for some popular players, but that would break as soon as for example Youtube decided to change the layout a bit.
    • jannes 7y ago
      If Firefox kept any website-controlled interface it would give websites an opportunity to block the feature by overlaying it with a black rectangle. Most content providers probably don't like this feature.
  • detritus 7y ago
    I couldn't get it either then tried it with a Twitter video just yesterday.. which made me realise what use it might be, were it not for Twitter muting videos that are not in focus. I really dislike Twitter.
  • kevingadd 7y ago
    It's built in because the browser is best equipped to provide this feature universally for HTML <video> elements and (if necessary) lie to the page about whether it's currently active. I was kind of skeptical about it but given that in practice all it does is display a small popout icon on video mouse-over, it's not really that annoying.
• shd4 7y ago
  Nightly is now 74.0a1 (major versions get released every 4 to 5 weeks).
• IshKebab 7y ago
  Does fingerprint blocking just use a blacklist, like ad blockers? Seems like a pretty lame approach. Shouldn't they focus on approaches that work for all future scripts? I.e. making browsers seem less unique.
  • GlitchMr 7y ago
    It's complicated. There is in fact a hidden option that makes the web browser less unique, but using it has side-effects such as retrieving pages in English with UTC timezone, noticeably reducing the browser view point size, breaking WebGL, break some JavaScript using <canvas> and most notably, making the web browser noticeably slower. It's not something that a web browser can afford to have without informing the user of the consequences. Not to mention without additional measures, this is unlikely to help much against fingerprinting. You are probably better of using Tor Browser.
  • surround 7y ago
    Yes, it’s a blacklist. However, there is ongoing work to improve privacy.resistFingerprinting (enabled in about:config) which makes the browser more similar to other users with this setting enabled.
• mxmilkb 7y ago
  Can anyone advise how far away hardware accelerated video on Linux might be?
  • posix_me_less 7y ago
    In a browser, gpu acceleration is a security risk, cf. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/13799/is-webgl-a-security-concern https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/13799/is-webgl-... TLDR: if js gets direct control of GPU, it can read/modify present and past screens. Maybe after Wayland implementations get good enough, distributions will make hw acceleration work securely with wayland compositors, probably years? Just guessing. Playing video on youtube is easy, but performance sucks due to bloated youtube website. Performance of the same video URL in empty page with video player is much better, close to that in video player with CPU only. If you need GPU acceleration, you can use something like youtube-dl or mpv to play videos on a URL in a video player.
    • megous 7y ago
      GPU != video acceleration. The question is about whether FF is finally using va-api to accelerate video codec decoding.
      • mxmilkb 7y ago
        I do wonder how much could be saved on energy bills for one of the most common uses of the net (watching videos), especially for folk in developing nations.
      • posix_me_less 7y ago
        Oh dear. Video acceleration means GPU is doing what CPU would be else doing. Which means user threads get less indirect access to GPU. Which is a potential security risk, because GPUs and GL are designed to perform, not to secure data. VA-API is not mentioned in the question at all. It is the most common api for video acceleration, but there are others - direct vdpau, or nvdec.
• fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  Here's my Firefox wishlist: - Open new windows more quickly. Firefox feels sluggish (on Mac) even though it isn't, simply because it opens new windows far more slowly than Safari or Chrome. - Use the platform native key store. I don't want my passwords stored unencrypted on disk. But I don't want to enter a separate master password either. I do want to use fingerprint/face unlock on mobile to reveal passwords. - Give me a setting to autoconfirm all cookie consent requests and lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header. Cookie consent was well meaning, but it has turned out to make things worse. Let's move on.
  • andai 7y ago
    It loads pages slower, too. Once they actually load though, performance is on par.
  • coldpie 7y ago
    > - Give me a setting to autoconfirm all cookie consent requests and lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header. Cookie consent was well meaning, but it has turned out to make things worse. Let's move on. Most of those are implemented in JS, so NoScript goes a pretty long way to fixing this. It would be nice if Firefox somehow auto-detected them, and other useless pop-overs, and nuked them.
    • efreak 7y ago
      Unfortunately, browsing with JavaScript disabled on mobile, I've noticed quite a large number of sites (usually WordPress blogs) that have the opt out button in the HTML, controlled server-side, so you have to enable JavaScript at least once to get rid of it. Given that I prefer brave or bromite custom tabs (via Lynket) for short sessions on mobile (and prefer not to have long sessions on mobile at all), I generally just deal with it.
  • Ghexor 7y ago
    Regarding #3 you might want to check out the "I don't care about cookies" add-on. I use I on Firefox mobile and desktop - don't know if there's a chromium version. Almost forgot I use it which is the most positive review an add-on like this could receive.
• nailer 7y ago
  Still hanging out for Replay, which if it gets into mainline Firefox, will easily make the FF the best JS development environment: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/WebReplay https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...
• martin-adams 7y ago
  "Say goodbye to annoying notification requests (unless you want them)" For a moment I thought they had done this for the cookie and privacy notices. Oh how that would be amazing to move that functionality into the browser.
  • brink 7y ago
    The "I don't care about cookies" extension is a nice solution for now. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...
• ekns 7y ago
  Switched to Firefox recently on my desktop. I had the strangest problem with Chrome: Somehow it just kept forking more and more processes until the rlimit got filled (100k+ threads/processes). Too much trouble to debug it so I opted to switch instead.
• felixfoertsch 7y ago
  Can anybody share some insight as to why the PiP mode is implemented non-natively? Both macOs and Windows have a system PiP mode that should be usable?
• perlpimp 7y ago
  am slightly dismayed that to this day on macOS I can't use back and forward buttons even if I redefine them in karabiner. it works with other browsers, seems that autoscroll feature is no degrading gracefully when you disable it.
  • gdw2 7y ago
    I mapped my mouse's back button to backspace and it works okay in FF.
• mtm7 7y ago
  Firefox keeps getting better. I really want to switch. The only thing that’s holding me back is the design. It just doesn’t look as modern as Chrome or Brave. The back button is a different height than the search bar; the tab container doesn’t line up with the search from the left side of the window. And it has a weird mix of slightly-square and rounded buttons, which makes it feel like a second-class browser. I know that the average person isn’t concerned with these things, but I spend almost all of my day in a browser, and I want it to look as good (or better) than the competition.
  • suprfnk 7y ago
    > The back button is a different height than the search bar If you right click the top bar, click Customize, click the "Density" menu on the bottom, and use "Compact", the back button is the same height.
    • miohtama 7y ago
      Also note that a large Back button is a result of usability research, as the Back button is the most clicked item in the browser.
  • rossdavidh 7y ago
    You like what you like, but I just want to point out that as a Firefox-first user, when I switch to Chrome to check that whatever I'm working on is cross-browser functional, I am struck with how bad Chrome looks. So I think some of what you perceive as "modern" is just what you're used to, and a short time after switching it will not bother you. But, of course, you like whatever you like.
    • kmlx 7y ago
      i think the problem is that firefox looks out of place when compared to chrome, safari, brave, vivaldi etc
  • andrewkdinh 7y ago
    If you’re interested in having Chrome’s look in Firefox, check out MaterialFox. https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox
• Siecje 7y ago
  The only thing that doesn't work in Firefox is exec in the kubernetes dashboard. I have to switch to Chromium when I need to do that.
  • digitarald 7y ago
    Could you file an issue here? https://webcompat.com/issues/new https://webcompat.com/issues/new
• aprvchndrs 7y ago
  Finally Picture in Picture on MacOS. The last reason for me to keep using Safari/Chrome is gone.
  • felixfoertsch 7y ago
    I was missing that one too and did some research about it a while ago. You can achieve the system-wide PiP mode in Safari with a bookmarklet. I posted the guide here: https://felixfoertsch.github.io/tip/2019/02/15/use-pip-via-bookmarklet.html https://felixfoertsch.github.io/tip/2019/02/15/use-pip-via-b...
    • aprvchndrs 7y ago
      PiP worked in Safari with an extension[0] right? That's why I was still using it for YouTube streaming in the background. I've switched to Firefox on almost every other platform (apart from iOS). with Firefox 72, I've switch to Firefox only on MacOS as well. [0]:https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-nearly-every-video/id1160374471?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-nearly-every-...
• hackinthebochs 7y ago
  Has firefox fixed video playback on sites like instagram and gfycat yet? Their mp4 playback was broken for a significant number of videos last time I attempted to update. I'm still on an FF version 10 versions back because of their atrocious compatibility with mp4s (which is still incompatible, but less so).
  • zcdziura 7y ago
    What have you noticed about mp4 video playback that is broken? I've used Firefox as my daily driver for many, many years (even before the Quantum updates) and have never noticed any playback errors.
    • hackinthebochs 7y ago
      It simply doesn't work for some non-trivial amount of videos, e.g. some instagram stories or gfycat mp4s. If you load the link directly in the browser it will say the file is corrupt. Loading the same link in chrome plays fine.
      • padenot 7y ago
        Would you mind filing a bug at [0] with the content of about:support and maybe a link or two where it doesn't work? Happy to have an initial look into this (I work on the media team at Mozilla). [0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=Audio%2FVideo%3A%20playback https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp..., you can log in with a github account or create one
        • yoasif_ 7y ago
          I suspect this user is on Linux and doesn't have h.264 codecs installed. They should be able to do this fairly easily -- two distros here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/assembly_installing-plugins-for-playing-movies-and-music/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/assembly_ins...
• dsirola 7y ago
  I really like Firefox, but I had to switch back to Chrome because of resource usage. After using it for some time it got up to 3GB RAM consumption for a single tab with no plugins.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• pzmarzly 7y ago
  I find Firefox and Thunderbird amazing, I just miss being able to customize keyboard shortcuts. Thunderbird ones are especially evil (they don’t use any modifier like Ctrl, so I often mess my inbox up when I don’t notice Thunderbird is the focused window). Also, while Firefox for iOS is leagues ahead of e.g. Brave, it still has many issues.
• cjauvin 7y ago
  I too would like to join the bandwagon of people happily switching from Chrome to Firefox (mainly for ethical reasons at this point). However, I am on Linux (Ubuntu 19.04 on a desktop machine) and last time I tried (around FF 70 I believe, maybe 2 months ago), I experienced horrible system-wide lockups, requiring hard reboots (I was surprised to discover that it's even still possible, nowadays). It probably doesn't help that I'm doing web development with React, and thus I'm heavily using some dev tools, but still.. Anyone would have any clue about this?
  • mixmastamyk 7y ago
    What video hardware do you have? Perhaps updating the driver. Fsck might help as well.
  • mkbkn 7y ago
    No idea why you're facing this but I'm on Linux Mint 18.3 and Firefox works flawlessly.
• drummer 7y ago
  If anyone from Mozilla is reading, is it too much to ask to host apk's for the mobile version on your site and provide other update mechanisms apart from google app store? Like what Signal are doing.
  • Tilian 7y ago
    https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/releases/ https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/releases/
  • sp332 7y ago
    It's not the most discoverable thing, but according to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android this link will always download the newest version: https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec-latest&os=android&lang=multi https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec-latest&os=andro...
• takeda 7y ago
  For the love of what's holy, I think the versioning system adopted by all browsers is just crazy.
  • sp332 7y ago
    New versions don't have to be a big deal. Most users won't even notice, and that's by design.
  • voxic11 7y ago
    What you you prefer? The year/month based versions that some operating systems use seems like an ok fit.
  • WorldMaker 7y ago
    Numbers aren't exactly a finite resource [1] and there's no particular reason that version numbers have to "stay small" other than aesthetics. [1] Mathematically positive natural numbers are infinite. Realistically, most systems traditionally implement version numbers as sets of at least 16-bit numbers and there are 65,536 numbers to choose from, not just the first ten or so.
• L_Rahman 7y ago
  I'm honestly surprised that we aren't talking about tab behavior here. Literally the only reason I keep using Chrome is that no matter how many tabs I have open, they're all visible at the top. There's visual persistence of state. On Firefox, even with the trick of reducing minimum tab width, my tabs overflow and I have to click through to get different groups of tabs. It is utterly maddening and I don't know why every other browser refuses to do Chrome like tabs. Why the continued choice to violate the first rule of UI design which is to keep things in the same place?
  • WorldMaker 7y ago
    Different people use tabs for different things. I have had browser sessions with 100+ tabs before as it can be a "spatial organization" tool more interesting than the History or Favorites lists because while I have to scroll through the tab bar, there are recognizable "neighborhoods" of tabs. Firefox has a lot of options for tab extensions if you wanted to explore for something more to your liking.
  • zipperhead 7y ago
    If you want to talk about tab behaviour, you might want to have a look at the Tree Style Tabs extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... Tabs are placed in the sidebar, nested in collapsible trees, with a scrollbar. It's a major game changer.
    • kylek 7y ago
      I'm always surprised when I find out more people don't know about this (or other vertical-tabs addons). I typically have dozens of tabs and keep them open for weeks at a time (ff is set to restore previous session. So most are usually unloaded, but I also have an addon to unload tabs at-will if it's ever a problem). Horizontal tabs feel so arcane after getting used to it, I'm surprised it's not a standard feature yet.
    • acemarke 7y ago
      Still the primary reason why I use Firefox. It allows me to have effectively an infinite number of tabs open, grouped, organized, and opened based on what I'm actually trying to get done now, or what I need to get back to later.
• _ph_ 7y ago
  I love the Picture in Picture feature. There are too many web sites which leave you only the choice between a rather small video or full screen. With PIP I can choose the size which works best for my screen. Also, as it floats on top, it is never covered by other applications. One thing would make this even more increadible: is there a way to set the default size and position? If the PIP feature would always start in my preferred size and position, this would be just so great.
  • nomadluap 7y ago
    Or even just remember size and position between instances
    • _ph_ 7y ago
      That would be the best, if a new video pops up in position and size of the previous one.
  • lysp 7y ago
    I use it all the time. I generally have my browser take up 3/4 of the screen with a small bit of space on the right free. If watching a video I can drag it into this free space and continue using browser while it's playing. Many years ago I used to use "popup video" extensions to achieve the same thing. This works much better though.
    • _ph_ 7y ago
      With my preferred setup, I play videos in the upper left corner, so with the current Firefox behavior, I always have to drag the PiP video around. Not the end of the world, but it would be a huge improvement, if it remembered video positions.
• mderazon 7y ago
  Only thing keeping me in Chrome is multiple profiles And no, Firefox containers are not the same, I cannot install two versions for 1pass - personal/private Firefox also have true "profiles" but they are kind of a hack
  • zamadatix 7y ago
    The profiles are fine it's the lack of integrated GUI that kills it. Just need the ability to launch a different profile in a new window from an existing window and it'd be all set. It drives me nuts because I have things in FF that can't easily be handled by containers and I have things in Chrome that can't easily be handled by profiles.
  • pcdoyle 7y ago
    I made a bookmark for about:profiles so I can launch a different profile, but it is a bit more cumbersome than having it be part of the main interface.
• ln_00 7y ago
  Finally. The notifications popup is seriously annoying.
  • all_blue_chucks 7y ago
    What we really need in these permission popups is the ability to say "no to all permissions from Gawker Media brands" and the problem would be mostly solved.
    • dannyw 7y ago
      What we really need: * Websites with notifications that are frequently denied by users, will lose the ability to request web notifications permissions. Users must manually enable it through Domain Settings.
  • wnevets 7y ago
    You can disable them for all sites in prefs IIRC.
    • 0xADEADBEE 7y ago
      Yep! I have this and it works perfectly. - about:config - dom.webnotifications.enabled = false That's it. Haven't seen one in months.
      • pier25 7y ago
        THANK YOU!
  • flukus 7y ago
    It seems like even adding it as a feature was a terrible idea, it's an example of how users needs are no longer the driving force behind web browsers. Was it supposed to replace RSS or something?
    • IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
• 2bitencryption 7y ago
  I'm a huge fan of the picture-in-picture, though I wish for a few enhancements: I wish clicking anywhere on the box would act as "play/pause", instead of requiring me to hunt down the button. And of course I wish for some visible/interactable buffer-bar, though I realize that might not be standardized across webplayers, so maybe not possible.
  • pkulak 7y ago
    I just wish they would enable VAAPI video decoding in Linux.
• rafaelvasco 7y ago
  Switched to Firefox in my current machine. Never looked back. Before i used Chrome, Yandex, Opera, Vivaldi.. I'm good with FF for now.
• zamadatix 7y ago
  I know the hacks blog tends to stick to "what web technologies changed" but 72 also introduces "Experimental support for using client certificates from the OS certificate store can be enabled by setting the preference security.osclientcerts.autoload to true (Windows only)." which has always been a huge PITA for me while testing and many interested in these technology changes are probably interested in this flag (though maybe moreso when Mac/Linux get supported).
  • worble 7y ago
    I've always used the security.enterprise_roots.enabled flag for this, is this new one different?
    • Boulth 7y ago
      From the property name it sounds like your property is about trust roots (CAs) and parent's about client certificates (for mutual TLS authentication).
  • iso947 7y ago
    Safari is terrible with client certs - it seems to store the default on a per page basis rather than per domain. Changing that involves diving deep into keychain. Chrome usually works but yesterday a colleague had problems where the dialog asking which cert to use wouldn’t respond. Firefox just works. It’s a shame that certificates aren’t used more widely. They don’t work at all in captive portal pages on OS X or iphones :(
  • radicalriddler 7y ago
    THANK GOD. Now I can 95% swap to Mozilla Firefox for work as well.
• Rotten194 7y ago
  I find the notification permission change (requiring it to be after a user gesture) really annoying. It doesn't do almost anything to combat permission spam (if you're visiting a clickbait site, you'll probably click or scroll at least once, especially on mobile where sites usually have a giant header so you need to scroll past the fold to even see that the article is clickbait), and just inconveniences developers who have to special-case Firefox's divergence from the spec when trying to legitimately use the gated features.
  • mintplant 7y ago
    If it's treated the same way as popup windows, then scrolling shouldn't count.
  • pier25 7y ago
    Firefox should include a setting to disable all requests for notifications much like they give you total control to block autoplay.
    • barryvan 7y ago
      It does! https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no-notifications/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no-notifications/
      • pier25 7y ago
        Finally!
• floatingsmoke 7y ago
  Still no pinch to zoom. No chance on macOS.
  • smcleod 7y ago
    A workaround if you really want that might be to set a bettertouchtool hotkey mapping pinch to CMD+/- when in the Firefox app.
    • floatingsmoke 7y ago
      I actually mean double tap zoom that zooms to HTML element that your cursor on. Amazing feature for browsing experience. Chromium has this feature since a lot.
      • seaish 7y ago
        This extension does that mostly. The only problem is that it zooms linearly, so when you get closer it takes more input to scale the same amount. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-touch-zoom/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-touch-z... Also read the description: there's an option to enable it, but for me at least, it was too buggy to use.
      • OrgNet 7y ago
        I use that feature often on Android/Firefox
  • vardump 7y ago
    Just set "apz.allow_zooming" to true in about:config. Pinch zoom works for me on macOS at least, didn't try on Windows yet. Works smoothly, just like in Safari and Chrome. Perhaps there are still some minor bugs and they don't enable it by default?
    • floatingsmoke 7y ago
      Nice try. It works by pinching but double tap and smart zoom to cursor. And if you zoom in somehow, you cannot pan over the page because Firefox act like you are seeing full screen and trying to go back or forward in browser history.
• donmcronald 7y ago
  > User research commonly brings up permission prompt spam as a top user annoyance What's user research? Jokes aside, my favorite feature in Firefox is the good old-fashioned search box. I use Bing by default and repeat searches on Google or Duck Duck Go if I don't find results right away.
  • mey 7y ago
    Have you found Bing more desirable than DuckDuckGo for a specific reason? (Uses DuckDuckGo and liberal use of the bangs when things don't come up as expected)
    • war1025 7y ago
      I've used Yahoo since the early 2000s and never hopped on the Google bandwagon. The times Ive tried to find things in Google because "people say it has better search", I've not had much luck. Possibly because they don't have extensive data on me and my search preferences? I think Yahoo is backed by Bing these days? I always find its search results perfectly adequate.
      • iudqnolq 7y ago
        By the way, DDG is also essentially entirely backed by bing. Bing except ddg for bangs is pretty much the same as just DDG.
      • agumonkey 7y ago
        Interesting I realize that Google results never really became more precise with my usage.
    • donmcronald 7y ago
      > Have you found Bing more desirable than DuckDuckGo for a specific reason? No. I just wanted to diversify away from Google a bit and I started with Bing because of Microsoft Rewards. I've only been getting about 50 (USD) cents per month in points though, so it's not compelling.
• butz 7y ago
  With notification spam fixed, how about tackling cookie banners spam next? Let's work on a standard to allow user to set their preferred cookie settings level once in browser UI and keep websites clean.
  • alerighi 7y ago
    Unfortunately, they are required by law (at least in Europe) and we can't do much about it. You can't say use a browser API to set a global setting for them, because GDPR explicitly requires that every website must get the user consent for them. Of course the real solution (and the reason why GDPR introduced the banner) is for website to stop using cookies for tracking their users and thus have no reason to put the banner (you don't need the banner for technical cookies, such as the one used for logins, but only for third party profiling cookies).
    • antisthenes 7y ago
      > You can't say use a browser API to set a global setting for them, because GDPR explicitly requires that every website must get the user consent for them. I can see why that prevents a browser from auto-accepting all cookies, but how in the world does this logic apply to me if I want to deny consent to 100% of the websites to use cookies? Set the default on the browser to deny all consent, and show the cookie notification somewhere unobtrusive, the same way it was done for notifications.
      • afiori 7y ago
        I suspect that it would be far to expensive to make it work on the hard 20% of websites and brittle on the easy 80%. As a personal confession I cannot sympathize for this animosity towards banners. Apps usually have a worse onboarding experience than websites. My only considerations of GDPR notices is to note how many of them manage to be uncompliant and wonder if archiving services can bypass them.
      • efreak 7y ago
        The browser already has logic/settings controlling which cookies are accepted (first party, all, none). These settings have existed in most browsers for years. It's unfortunate that the cookie law didn't build on this in some way.
• svnpenn 7y ago
  Dont forget that if you manually update, Firefox destroys your update settings: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400
• JoeMayoBot 7y ago
  Haven't been paying attention or keeping up and noticed the version number is 72. One thought is "Wow - that's a lot" and another is "That doesn't sound like semantic versioning."
  • p1necone 7y ago
    Semantic versioning doesn't make sense for user facing software. Maintaining API compatibility on the software -> user interface isn't really a problem/doesn't make sense compared to software -> software interfaces.
    • pc2g4d 7y ago
      Firefox exposes APIs that other software builds on. Seems like semantic versioning would make sense for them.
• throw7 7y ago
  Are they doing anything about floating videos? It's annoying on desktop, but on mobile it's so bad I just don't bother. Typically it's "news" sites that use it.
  • bn7t 7y ago
    IIRC they disabled autoplay for videos with sound. In the settings you can also completely disable autoplay for all videos.
• amelius 7y ago
  Password fields are broken in Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome Flashback Metacity), when using Firefox's Sync feature, (and without add-ons). This was a problem in recent versions, and is still a problem in version 72.
  • glandium 7y ago
    Are you saying this is what happens with the Ubuntu package or with the Mozilla binary? If the former, it could be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601707 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601707
    • amelius 7y ago
      I'm using the Mozilla binary. And it's not a crash, but it appears to be a focus problem (password field loses and gets back focus when typing, randomly).
      • glandium 7y ago
        FWIW, the bug I linked to doesn't necessarily manifest itself as a crash. But it doesn't apply to the Mozilla binary.
  • muktupavels 7y ago
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-flashback/+bug/1836659 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-flashback/+b...
    • amelius 7y ago
      Thanks!
• shmerl 7y ago
  Looking forward to video decoding (and encoding) hardware acceleration through VAAPI in Firefox on Linux. Now that WebRender is already in the codebase, at least doing it for WebRender path would be very welcome.
• dang 7y ago
  Related: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/firefox-72-our-first-song-of-2020/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/firefox-72-our-first-song-... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981817).
• miohtama 7y ago
  Note that with some tinkering you can already manually enable WebRender, fast GPU and Rust based rendering engine, in stable Firefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206
  • aganame 7y ago
    Note also that enabling webrender might make your experience (including performance) worse.
    • nojvek 7y ago
      Why would that be ?
      • Caspy7 7y ago
        Because it's already enabled on hardware where it's known to work well but disabled where it has issues.
        • miohtama 7y ago
          Yeah, it is definitely not bug free and tabs crash more often. However I still feel performance improvement and happy to live on the edge. MacBook Pro 2017.
• huntermeyer 7y ago
  How many logos does Firefox have?
• jcoffland 7y ago
  The only feature I really want FF to bring back is multi-row tabs.
• coldfire 7y ago
  As a long time Chrome user, and someone who (admittedly) said to a FF fan about an year ago, that it's too late for FF to catch up to Chrome now. I gave FF another shot about 6 months ago, and I'm liking it more every month since then. It has been my primary browser outside of work, the major reason I use Chrome now is for Chrome Dev Tools. Also, some websites don't behave well in FF and I find that most of the time it's because of the site tracking being blocked. So not a big deal
  • DrJaws 7y ago
    wouldn't firefox dev edition give you the tools you need? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
    • arielm 7y ago
      Thanks for the tip!
    • rtpg 7y ago
      FF still has some difficulties with some stuff (I've had issues with sourcemaps in particular, they would always work in Chrome but sometimes don't in FF) I get most of my stuff working in FF so don't need to jump to Chrome most of the time but for some gnarly stuff I end up in Chrome
    • thayne 7y ago
      feature-wise firefox dev tools are pretty close to chrome's. However, if you have a large number (thousands) of sources and try to set a breakpoint, performance slows to a crawl. This probably doesn't impact a lot of web developers, but when you develop a large complicated web app and want to debug unobfuscated/unminimized code, this is a big pain point. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288493 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288493
      • DrJaws 7y ago
        interesting, thanks for the insight
• alistproducer2 7y ago
  I switched to ff a couples years ago and up until the last few months everything has been great. Now a lot of important sites don't work because the content security policy is completely inflexible. It should allow me to make exceptions on sites I chose. I've had to install chrome just for a couple sites and now its just easier to make chrome my daily driver again. The ff team should consider making the CSP flexible.
  • saghm 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, what sites did you have trouble with? I also switched to Firefox a year or two ago, and I haven't had anything noticeably break recently, so I'm curious if I'm just not going to the sites that have issues or if there's something else different in my config that solves it.
• Adoum 7y ago
  I'am my friend in member in you.
• gombosg 7y ago
  I've been using Firefox for the last 10 or so years. (Used the "new Chrome-Opera" for a while but went back soon) These recent developments are awesome. As a frontend developer, I also find the devtools absolutely competitive with Chrome's. The default ad- and tracker blocking is nice, I only need to use uBblock Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that), since Youtube became nearly unusable due to the massive amount of ads. Edit: also, they are fortunately tackling two prominent annoyances of the "modern web" i.e. push notification popups (for those who don't turn the whole feature off outright in about:config) and video autoplay. So sad that Firefox's market share is still just 9-10%. :(
  • SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    > I only need to use uBblock Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that), since Youtube became nearly unusable due to the massive amount of ads. Depends how much you're using it, but as it's pretty much become the primary source of entertainment in our household I decided the most practical and ethical option was to just pay for it.
    • wooger 7y ago
      Not sure this is even an option outside the US.
      • mtmrmuthu 7y ago
        It is available in a lot of countries. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en
      • Benjamin_Dobell 7y ago
        No doubt it's not possible everywhere, but many countries offer YouTube Red (or whatever it's called now), been paying for it bundled with Google Play Music for years (in Australia).
    • gombosg 7y ago
      Yeah... I'm doing the same for Deezer (paying for listening to streaming music) but I only use Youtube occasionally. Got fed up when YT showed 2 ads every 20 minutes in the middle of a classical music concert. I'm not expecting it to be ad-free, but expecting it to be less intrusive/annoying.
• zelly 7y ago
  Firefox's killer feature was generating sync keys locally and letting you self-host a compatible sync host. Chrome generates the sync keys on server and has proprietary sync software. That's it. That's all it took for me to switch. I know FF eats almost double the CPU compared to Chrome. I know 1 out of every 10 webapps will just not work in it. That's fine. I will take the security and privacy over convenience. Just buy a better CPU.
  • aequitas 7y ago
    > Just buy a better CPU. This gets a little hard when the device you want to run FF on is a old laptop that doesn't need replacing and where battery life is more important than raw speed.
• benboughton1 7y ago
  Firefox is great on desktop. I use it 95+% of time. But it is not so good on Android. Ebay is great example. Most of the time, go to page 2 of search results and you get no listings. I want to use Firefox on mobile as it syncs my bookmarks and passwords but things like this are frustrating.
  • yoasif_ 7y ago
    Try Firefox Preview: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
• goodguy1234 7y ago
  I still dont get why firefox is 1 to 2 seconds slow doing everything. We already have uorgin block and https everywhere and privacy beaver. They just want to make their browser even more bloated. And lets not even talk about linux distro. On my xubuntu its even slower than chromium or chrome. Here is my advice: Invest everything on speed. Your user already know about privacy and stuff. That why less than 9% of us are left.
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    Check the network panel. See the Megabytes of html and js a browser needs to work with. It’s a miracle that browsers can render all that in the seconds it usually takes them, and if Chrome is a second faster, it’s due to the billion $ company behind investing the GPD of a medium-sized country into optimizing it.
  • deadbunny 7y ago
    As a FF linux user both at home and at work I can't say I've ever noticed FF being consistently slower. Having said that I have used nothing but FF for the last 20odd years so maybe I'm just used to it...
• muchogris 7y ago
  The one-click search icons have been removed from the adress bar to the search bar? I cant tell if this is a hidden design feature that does not appear on the release notes, but it sure will bother me...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• maljx 7y ago
  Unfortunately the font rendering is still not up to Chromes, a lot of sites look weird. Fastmail for instance is rendered with a visibly smaller font on FF, and it looks blurry on FF. (Win10).
• jevgeni 7y ago
  Now if they include a way to block modal subscribe-to-our-bullshit-newsletter pop-ups, it would be the world's most perfect browser.
• DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  2 grave security/privacy issues in Firefox right now (both are still open after more than 1 year): Firefox Installs non-free binaries from Cisco and Google again https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582 firefox: Safe Browsing updates fail due to insufficient quota on the Google API key https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147 Just recently I discovered DoH was activated by default now and bypassing my /etc/hosts block list without any warning. This opened me up to tracking from sites I thought I had blocked. In all above cases the failure-modes are insecure. It's like a firewall that suddenly switches its enforcement policy from a deny-all+whitelisting to allow-all+blacklisting without properly informing users. Totally unacceptable!
  • Ygg2 7y ago
    Is this related to Firefox DRM implementation?
    • DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      no. see this post which has meanwhile hit the frontpage for better discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990505
      • opencl 7y ago
        The non-free binary is the DRM implementation. The bug also mentions openh264 but it's BSD licensed so I'm confused as to why anyone considers it non-free.
  • mikl 7y ago
    Some rather sensationalist claims there. Other than infringing on the DFSG, I don’t really see the problem with those binaries. If you’re downloading compiled software from anyone, you’re trusting them to not have put nasty things in the binary. There could be lots of interesting things injected to the binaries that are not part of the open source code. As for the safe browsing thing, that looks to be a bug specific to Debian’s Firefox-distribution, not FF itself. And as for DoH, it’s not exactly a secret, it’s been widely reported on and featured in the release notes. If you’re technically competent to play around with `/etc/hosts`, you should be capable of reading the release notes, too.
• skywal_l 7y ago
  With websocket frames !
• markosaric 7y ago
  It's such a great update again! And now this: "Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month" I love how Google follows Firefox with these "better web experience" features but only if they don't impact their business model.
• mwexler 7y ago
  I appreciate all the upgrades, but I keep finding that Firefox is abysmal for battery life, even the versions that supposedly have focused on this issue. Have folks found ways to reduce it's power consumption on OSX?
  • ntp85 7y ago
    Have you tried one of the more recent versions? Power consumption should have been reduced by using the CoreAnimation framework on macOS.
    • mwexler 7y ago
      There is improvement, but it's gone from somewhat unusable to just abysmal, at least in my environment. YMMV, of course.
• lai 7y ago
  I only use FF on mobile because I can run the uBlock extension on it.
• happppy 7y ago
  honestly I gave Firefox a try but it didn't work for me. I am using Chrome.
• egberts1 7y ago
  What the hey? No hash values posted after downloading the Firefox binary. How can we tell that we got the real deal, especially if the original Firefox binary got compromised?