16 ms·

Firefox 77

143 points by jiehong 6y ago

coronadisaster 6y ago
"We’re still preparing the notes for this release, and will post them here when they are ready. Please check back later."
- Tomte 6y ago
  "I really want to be the first one to post this, even if nothing has been released, yet". Happens all the time on HN, and our defense is a little link above.
  - jiehong 6y ago
    I got the update on Archlinux, as it's released, but I was surprised to find an empty release note…
    - coronadisaster 6y ago
      why didn't you post the arch package link then?
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  lol, I got downvoted for what the link originally said
blakesterz 6y ago
"Pocket recommendations, featuring some of the best stories on the web, will appear on the Firefox new tab for our users in the UK." I really hate to admit how often those darn Pocket recommendations get me! I don't know how they choose what shows up on my tab, but more often than not, there's at least one thing in there I end up reading.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  I love targeted ads too! Let us all embrace the botnet.
- als0 6y ago
  Does anyone know why specifically the UK? Has it been rolled out in the US already?
  - dundarious 6y ago
    Yes
- doublesCs 6y ago
  Surely it's not difficult to come up with 5-10 interesting articles? Anyway, personally I've never seen pocket on my firefox. My new tab opens to a blank page. And I love firefox for allowing this degree of customization.
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  I use Safari on my laptop but, I have Firefox on my personal desktop. I don't see why Firefox keeps on putting in more and more features that compromise their previous brand image and actions that remove privacy oriented features or add features that revert this. Even Windows is putting ads in your face in the operating system itself.
- appleiigs 6y ago
  I was curious about that too. I wasn't sure if it was targeted ads or a news aggregator. I think it's more of a news aggregator. From the Firefox New Tab FAQ (https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-recommendations-faq https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...) > Are these stories personalized to me? For the most part, no. Most recommendations on your new tab come from a general list of the best of stories on the web. > Pocket occasionally partners with select publishers and brands to deliver high-quality sponsored stories to our users. These stories will always be clearly marked > Pocket’s 30+ million global users help guide our curation by pointing us to thought-provoking essays, hidden gems, and fascinating deep-dives from across the web. Editors at Pocket then sift through the most-recommended and most-read stories and handpick the best to share with the wider Pocket and Firefox communities
siscia 6y ago
How better is the webrender? Should people get excited about it?
caution 6y ago
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-77-devtool-improvements-and-web-platform-updates/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-77-devtool-...
nicoburns 6y ago
> Source map support also got a lot more reliable and will just work for a lot more cases This is good news if it's true. Source map support seems pretty patchy across both Chrome and Firefox. I've had the work reliably at times in the past. But something always seems to shift which breaks them again, and I've never been able to work out what it is.
- XaspR8d 6y ago
  Yeah and debugging it usually requires me to examine my least favorite and most fragile parts of my build tools. I think my employer's gulp config has had source maps broken for 2 years now, but I'm probably the only person who would do anything about it...
have_faith 6y ago
> ...some of the best stories on the web, will appear on the Firefox new tab... Why is FireFox trying to get into article recommendations? I can only assume it allows some method of monetisation once users get used to it being there. Feels a bit off.
- KoftaBob 6y ago
  They own Pocket, so that's probably related.
- jakemal 6y ago
  It looks like they are already monetizing it. A few of the articles have a "Sponsored by X" below them. I don't love that, but at least they set it up in a way where they aren't collecting data on users to show them. They have to pay the bills somehow.
  - okasaki 6y ago
    The $500M per year they get from Google isn't enough to pay the bills?
    - ValentineC 6y ago
      It's dangerous to depend on a single company (that also happens to have a competing product). What happens if the money stops coming?
      - asldfhasdf2 6y ago
        > that also happens to have a competing product Firefox is a "feature" for Google Chrome. The day Google stops paying mozilla and mozilla close shop, they will get the same treatment Google itself set up in courts against Microsoft for IE6. It's pretty much protection money for their past selfs.
        hu3 6y ago
sunseb 6y ago
No Firefox, no! Please don't embed distraction directly into the browser (pocket recommendations)! I don't want to hear about Coronavirus or ongoing politics bullshit whenever I open a tab! I just want to ignore this noise.
- klyrs 6y ago
  This has been going on for quite a while now. AFAIK you can still disable pocket
- jfk13 6y ago
  Fortunately, you can turn it off if you don't like it.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    There will be a day where the option to remove it will be gone.
    - echeese 6y ago
      When did they say that?
- kilroy123 6y ago
  I use the extension momentum to display a nice image. There are many alternative extensions for the new tab background.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Just turn off pocket in about:config.
  - CaioAlonso 6y ago
    Why do I have to opt-out of this? This should be opt-in.
  - jdofaz 6y ago
AtticHacker 6y ago
Whenever I looked at pocket recommendations, I would either get: 1. political content; which is something I barely read. And a lot of the content doesn't even align with me (But again, I don't read a lot of political articles) 2. US Sports; I'm european! I'd try to mark everything as "Not interested", but that never really changed anything in the end. I do use Pocket, but mostly as a bookmarking tool. And all the topics that I bookmark are either tech, or self help / phychology related. I never get anything that matches these topics in my recommendations. Not really looking forward to seeing them on my new tab. But I assume you can switch it off.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  Yes, you can turn it off. I keep it on on my home machine as I frequently come across interesting articles. (I’ve never seen any sports articles)
pcx 6y ago
Everyone not happy with pocket recommendations, what is the alternate source of revenue? Not enough will pay for the product. On the other hand Mozilla has to compete with Apple, Google & Microsoft, all of whom are fighting hard for the Web. Mozilla is doing good overall. They are doing some fundamental work to get back the technical edge, still trying to keep the future of the platform open with WebAssembly and their products have become much more reliable now. We have to cut them some slack.
- bzb3 6y ago
  They could use the donations to improve Firefox, to pay the salaries of the engineers, instead of all the political nonsense they do with the foundation. Yes, your donations go towards that. And they could cut the salaries of management instead of giving themselves raises. Instead we got ads in the home page.
  - jakemal 6y ago
    Ads that, with a single click, you can hide forever.
  - pcx 6y ago
    1. They are doing it with substantially less budget than their competitors. 2. Developers shouldn't have to build software for the greater good by sacrificing their livelihood. 3. I am pretty sure many people building all this amazing tech can definitely get paid better in other places 4. These days when someone like Facebook fails to be bold, I would prefer to support someone like Mozilla who walks the talk.
    - bzb3 6y ago
      I don't think you get what I said. I said: if they stopped throwing money down the drain with the politised foundation and the executives stopped raising their salaries they wouldn't have to run ads and maybe they could even pay their engineers more money.
      - 6y ago
vmateixeira 6y ago
So... what kind of nonsense do I need to disable in about:config this time?
- jfk13 6y ago
  What a pointless question; how can any of us know what your individual preferences are like? Mozilla aims to ship a default configuration that works well for a large number of users. Of course there'll be people -- like yourself, apparently -- who'd prefer some things to be configured differently, but what you'd like changed is entirely up to you. Maybe you should be grateful Firefox offers (quite a lot of) customisation opportunities, instead of just posting snarky remarks.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    It's not pointless to ask what long-standing behaviors are changed this time around. Mozilla has a history of making gratuitous UI changes that force existing users to re-learn something and have questionable benefits for new users. They also have a tendency to leave those changes (or at least the about:config workarounds) out of the release notes.
  - vmateixeira 6y ago
    They don't need to know what my individual preferences are, actually, I would be glad if they don't try to "find them out". Are you sure they're trying to ship what works best for most people? I've not read that anywhere. If they really wanted people to have a choice, they wouldn't be adding configurations that can't be switched on/off through they're preferences menu - like for example, that crazy bar they just added a couple of releases ago - oh.. and which apparently you are not allowed to switch off no more, not even through about:config, according to sibling comment. Also, they have a track record of breaking old configuration options quite often through updates. I am grateful by what they offer - just not sure they're not sneakily changing course, similar to what chrome did.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > Maybe you should be grateful Firefox offers (quite a lot of) customisation opportunities, instead of just posting snarky remarks. That's called user feedback. Users are always right. And looking at Firefox's browser share they are not getting too many new users anymore. Making the life of your existing users a little more miserable does not sound like a very sustainable strategy.
kleiba 6y ago
The biggest item on my wish-list is still a user-option to restore the previous (sensible) click behavior for the address bar: one click places the cursor, double click selects (all, but if I need to triple click for that it would be fine, too). Sadly, this wish will probably not come true any time soon... or ever.
- Tomte 6y ago
  No, we're not getting it back. I filed a bug, thinking this was an inadvertant side-effect of the new address bar, but it was closed WONTFIX. The old user setting was never really supposed to be used on Windows, just as a workaround for something I don't remember, and the use case is invalid. I still wish I'd get that distinction between single click and double click back.
  - kleiba 6y ago
    Yeah, I was aware of that bug report (thanks for filing it). The rationale given is ridiculous, though - anywhere else on my system if I click on a text field, the cursor gets placed where I click and nothing gets selected. It's hard for me to imagine what use case the current behavior is optimized for.
    - roryokane 6y ago
      > It's hard for me to imagine what use case the current behavior is optimized for. I think the current behavior is optimized for people who use the mouse for everything and don’t feel confident enough to edit the URL of the site they’re on. Such people aren’t comfortable with learning new keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-L or Alt-D, so they will notice an increase in speed because they only have to click once to select the URL. I imagine before they were either triple-clicking or clicking once and hitting Ctrl-A. Then those users type the name of the next site they want to visit, completely replacing the current URL, and press Enter to visit it.
- cannam 6y ago
  Same here - I've pinned my Linux machines to Firefox 74 for the moment, in the no-doubt vain hope that someone upstream will see sense before too long. I was previously using the option (that was removed in Firefox 75) to make the URL bars on the Windows and Mac versions behave in the same way as on Linux - I was really happy to be able to do that, since I've never understood why the single-click-highlight behaviour in some other browsers was supposed to be a good thing. But those Firefox installs are self-updating rather than managed through the package manager, so they got the new behaviour automatically. It's been a couple of months now, but I still don't like it.
PHGamer 6y ago
did they fix the issue with websockets over a forward proxy?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
theandrewbailey 6y ago
Firefox 77 includes AV1 image format[0] support! You'll need to set image.avif.enabled = true in about:config. [0] https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/
- nothis 6y ago
  Haven't been following this, is there any major site where this makes an impact? Youtube?
  - theandrewbailey 6y ago
    I doubt that any big site would be affected, since Firefox is the first browser shipping any form of AVIF support, even though most browsers already have AV1.
CaioAlonso 6y ago
I would financially support a fork of Firefox with all the garbage removed. The home page bullshit, Pocket, all the automatic requests made without user action, and more that I probably don't know of.
- gonational 6y ago
  +100 I will pay $100 annually, but I would need assurances that the telemetry is also 100% removed (no calls home, WHATSOEVER).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- nojito 6y ago
  And it will soon die off just like every other Firefox fork.
- uallo 6y ago
  You can easily disable it. Did you try that already? Do you need help?
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
And now my address bar expands on click, because browser.urlbar.update1 was removed from about:config. I knew this day was coming, but I'm still not happy it's here. The movement is distracting, and the alignment of the bar's expanded state is terrible. There's a reason most graphic design follows a grid system. We need a way to turn this off. I realize the old about:config flag was tied to a legacy code pathway, but now Mozilla should implement a new flag. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  AIUI, you can set the amount of items shown to 0 in about:config, and have what amounts to a non-expanding URL bar. It's not perfect, but it's a viable workaround.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    That sounds like you're talking about the dropdown menu that shows up below the URL bar, but the problem is the URL bar itself expands outside of its bounding box when it gets focus.
- butz 6y ago
  I'll probably try fixing that horrible location bar improvement with some custom userChrome.css https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html#mbarstyler https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b... I already removed some unused items from context menu and it feels great. Sadly, userChrome.css modifications are considered "legacy" and probably one day will be removed. Why can't we have customizable browser UI? I'd prefer Firefox to be more like KDE and less than GNOME (feature and configuration wise). Early versions of Opera had amazing customization options, and now - all browsers are same-ish.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Do you know if there's a way to specify custom userChrome in AutoConfig[1]? I rely on that to keep my customizations consistent across machines—I really don't want this to be a part of my profile. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-autoconfig https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
huhtenberg 6y ago
This Pocket thing just won't die, would it?
- uallo 6y ago
  Why would it? A lot of people like and actively use it. If you don't like the integration with Home, you can disable it.
at_a_remove 6y ago
I hope that about:performance has not been nerfed still further. Currently I have an issue wherein some tab, unknown to me, begins using one or more cores at full speed. About:performance allows me only to search by the eco-friendly "energy" usage bit, which somehow does not reveal which tab is doing it. I kill off the most active tabs according to that stat, nothing happens. And so I have had to default back to killing off a process and guessing which tab has crashed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MikusR 6y ago
For me his release broke uBlock Origin (Dashboard shows only menu without options and doesn't block anything), Twitter doesn't load, Reddit doesn't load
- MikusR 6y ago
  More reports: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gv765v/firefox_770_see_all_new_features_updates_and_fixes/fsnxmr1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gv765v/firefox_770... https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/gv9uwt/firefox_770_update_appears_to_have_removed_many/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/gv9uwt/firefox... https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gvc7zd/none_of_my_extensions_work_now_with_firefox_77/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gvc7zd/none_of_my_...
0x006A 6y ago
Why remove config options and force some UI that clearly people are not happy with? I can not type in a url without showing the most visited sites? At least let me press ctrl-l or click in the url bar and start typing before showing me helpful information, trying to enter a new URL, I really do not want to see the most common sites again and again and again and again! Is Firefox trying to kill the long tail of the internet and get everyone to just visit the top 5 sites?
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  UI teams universally think they know better than all the users they force their "improvements" onto.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  "Why remove [the] config [option]" is easily answered in this case. When Mozilla changed the address bar, they also rewrote a lot of overall address bar code, and the old about:config flag activated the old code pathway—it wasn't just a simple design tweak. You don't want to have all that old code sticking around in Firefox. What we need is a new flag that changes the design specifically.
- nojito 6y ago
  >some UI that clearly people are not happy with? Because swinging and appeasing the vocal minority is not sustainable.
RandomBacon 6y ago
People keep recommending Brave, but I keep countering with Firefox. It's getting a lot harder to convince people when Firefox is doubling-down on BS like the expanding address bar, integrating articles/ads, telemetry, etc. When I see Brave recommendations, they're primarily because of it's built-in ad-blocking. People value sanity. Don't introduce more visual distractions (essentially what the average person gets from an ad; they see it as a visual thing, they don't comprehend tracking and resource management like we do). Make Firefox clean, make it so that it can be easily recommended. When Chrome came out, people were excited because it was simple and sleek. It's okay to learn from competitors, don't let hubris be the downfall!
- sfink 6y ago
  I think a lot of people agree. And a lot of other people are pissed off about Firefox following Chrome's lead in stripping everything down visually. There's a solution, though -- as it happens, I happen to have the best opinion on this. Like, always the best. So really the Firefox designers should just ask me. I would think they would appreciate being able to confidently say that they're always doing the right thing?
  - reitanqild 6y ago
    You made me chuckle :-) I have the same superskill. We could make a consulting agency and people would pay us good money to know exactly how stuff should be done.
Normille 6y ago
@Mozilla: Wake me up when you bring back text-reflow. It's only been 9 years... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710298 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710298
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
To all who aren't happy with the way FX is going, may I suggest palemoon. I've been using it a long while and it's just straighforwardly good. http://www.palemoon.org/ http://www.palemoon.org/ Perhaps the easiest way of letting Mozilla know how you feel is by helping them lose market share to another. PM is a good browser. Not affiliated, it just works for me.
- smnthermes 6y ago
  Good suggestion. People shouldn't believe the FUD spread by Firefox fanboys: 1. http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml 2. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270 3. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399 4. https://old.reddit.com/r/palemoon/comments/evywwj/how_secure_is_pm_really/ffzc5iw/ https://old.reddit.com/r/palemoon/comments/evywwj/how_secure...
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    Interesting. I didn't know this. BTW I wonder where the assorted silent downvotes are coming from - just from my suggesting an alternative browser and your posting useful info.
accountinhn 6y ago
Part I never get is how and when did we got into the mindset of, open source means free and the backlash Mozilla receives for trying to monetize their product. Either I'm reading too much in-between the lines or I'm missing something.
user48372 6y ago
I’m sick of Firefox megabar. I’ve downgraded Firefox to the 76.0.1 already. It’s time to switch to another browser. Can you suggest any good ones? Or there is only one choice left?

143 points by jiehong 6y ago

"We’re still preparing the notes for this release, and will post them here when they are ready. Please check back later."

Tomte 6y ago
"I really want to be the first one to post this, even if nothing has been released, yet". Happens all the time on HN, and our defense is a little link above.
- jiehong 6y ago
  I got the update on Archlinux, as it's released, but I was surprised to find an empty release note…
  - coronadisaster 6y ago
    why didn't you post the arch package link then?
coronadisaster 6y ago
lol, I got downvoted for what the link originally said

blakesterz 6y ago

"Pocket recommendations, featuring some of the best stories on the web, will appear on the Firefox new tab for our users in the UK." I really hate to admit how often those darn Pocket recommendations get me! I don't know how they choose what shows up on my tab, but more often than not, there's at least one thing in there I end up reading.

NullPrefix 6y ago
I love targeted ads too! Let us all embrace the botnet.
als0 6y ago
Does anyone know why specifically the UK? Has it been rolled out in the US already?
- dundarious 6y ago
  Yes
doublesCs 6y ago
Surely it's not difficult to come up with 5-10 interesting articles? Anyway, personally I've never seen pocket on my firefox. My new tab opens to a blank page. And I love firefox for allowing this degree of customization.
zitterbewegung 6y ago
I use Safari on my laptop but, I have Firefox on my personal desktop. I don't see why Firefox keeps on putting in more and more features that compromise their previous brand image and actions that remove privacy oriented features or add features that revert this. Even Windows is putting ads in your face in the operating system itself.
appleiigs 6y ago
I was curious about that too. I wasn't sure if it was targeted ads or a news aggregator. I think it's more of a news aggregator. From the Firefox New Tab FAQ (https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-recommendations-faq https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...) > Are these stories personalized to me? For the most part, no. Most recommendations on your new tab come from a general list of the best of stories on the web. > Pocket occasionally partners with select publishers and brands to deliver high-quality sponsored stories to our users. These stories will always be clearly marked > Pocket’s 30+ million global users help guide our curation by pointing us to thought-provoking essays, hidden gems, and fascinating deep-dives from across the web. Editors at Pocket then sift through the most-recommended and most-read stories and handpick the best to share with the wider Pocket and Firefox communities

siscia 6y ago

How better is the webrender? Should people get excited about it?

caution 6y ago

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-77-devtool-improvements-and-web-platform-updates/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-77-devtool-...

nicoburns 6y ago

> Source map support also got a lot more reliable and will just work for a lot more cases This is good news if it's true. Source map support seems pretty patchy across both Chrome and Firefox. I've had the work reliably at times in the past. But something always seems to shift which breaks them again, and I've never been able to work out what it is.

XaspR8d 6y ago
Yeah and debugging it usually requires me to examine my least favorite and most fragile parts of my build tools. I think my employer's gulp config has had source maps broken for 2 years now, but I'm probably the only person who would do anything about it...

have_faith 6y ago

> ...some of the best stories on the web, will appear on the Firefox new tab... Why is FireFox trying to get into article recommendations? I can only assume it allows some method of monetisation once users get used to it being there. Feels a bit off.

KoftaBob 6y ago
They own Pocket, so that's probably related.
jakemal 6y ago
It looks like they are already monetizing it. A few of the articles have a "Sponsored by X" below them. I don't love that, but at least they set it up in a way where they aren't collecting data on users to show them. They have to pay the bills somehow.
- okasaki 6y ago
  The $500M per year they get from Google isn't enough to pay the bills?
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    It's dangerous to depend on a single company (that also happens to have a competing product). What happens if the money stops coming?
    - asldfhasdf2 6y ago
      > that also happens to have a competing product Firefox is a "feature" for Google Chrome. The day Google stops paying mozilla and mozilla close shop, they will get the same treatment Google itself set up in courts against Microsoft for IE6. It's pretty much protection money for their past selfs.
      - hu3 6y ago

sunseb 6y ago

No Firefox, no! Please don't embed distraction directly into the browser (pocket recommendations)! I don't want to hear about Coronavirus or ongoing politics bullshit whenever I open a tab! I just want to ignore this noise.

klyrs 6y ago
This has been going on for quite a while now. AFAIK you can still disable pocket
jfk13 6y ago
Fortunately, you can turn it off if you don't like it.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  There will be a day where the option to remove it will be gone.
  - echeese 6y ago
    When did they say that?
kilroy123 6y ago
I use the extension momentum to display a nice image. There are many alternative extensions for the new tab background.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Just turn off pocket in about:config.
- CaioAlonso 6y ago
  Why do I have to opt-out of this? This should be opt-in.
- jdofaz 6y ago

AtticHacker 6y ago

Whenever I looked at pocket recommendations, I would either get: 1. political content; which is something I barely read. And a lot of the content doesn't even align with me (But again, I don't read a lot of political articles) 2. US Sports; I'm european! I'd try to mark everything as "Not interested", but that never really changed anything in the end. I do use Pocket, but mostly as a bookmarking tool. And all the topics that I bookmark are either tech, or self help / phychology related. I never get anything that matches these topics in my recommendations. Not really looking forward to seeing them on my new tab. But I assume you can switch it off.

Tagbert 6y ago
Yes, you can turn it off. I keep it on on my home machine as I frequently come across interesting articles. (I’ve never seen any sports articles)

pcx 6y ago

Everyone not happy with pocket recommendations, what is the alternate source of revenue? Not enough will pay for the product. On the other hand Mozilla has to compete with Apple, Google & Microsoft, all of whom are fighting hard for the Web. Mozilla is doing good overall. They are doing some fundamental work to get back the technical edge, still trying to keep the future of the platform open with WebAssembly and their products have become much more reliable now. We have to cut them some slack.

bzb3 6y ago
They could use the donations to improve Firefox, to pay the salaries of the engineers, instead of all the political nonsense they do with the foundation. Yes, your donations go towards that. And they could cut the salaries of management instead of giving themselves raises. Instead we got ads in the home page.
- jakemal 6y ago
  Ads that, with a single click, you can hide forever.
- pcx 6y ago
  1. They are doing it with substantially less budget than their competitors. 2. Developers shouldn't have to build software for the greater good by sacrificing their livelihood. 3. I am pretty sure many people building all this amazing tech can definitely get paid better in other places 4. These days when someone like Facebook fails to be bold, I would prefer to support someone like Mozilla who walks the talk.
  - bzb3 6y ago
    I don't think you get what I said. I said: if they stopped throwing money down the drain with the politised foundation and the executives stopped raising their salaries they wouldn't have to run ads and maybe they could even pay their engineers more money.
    - 6y ago

vmateixeira 6y ago

So... what kind of nonsense do I need to disable in about:config this time?

jfk13 6y ago
What a pointless question; how can any of us know what your individual preferences are like? Mozilla aims to ship a default configuration that works well for a large number of users. Of course there'll be people -- like yourself, apparently -- who'd prefer some things to be configured differently, but what you'd like changed is entirely up to you. Maybe you should be grateful Firefox offers (quite a lot of) customisation opportunities, instead of just posting snarky remarks.
- wtallis 6y ago
  It's not pointless to ask what long-standing behaviors are changed this time around. Mozilla has a history of making gratuitous UI changes that force existing users to re-learn something and have questionable benefits for new users. They also have a tendency to leave those changes (or at least the about:config workarounds) out of the release notes.
- vmateixeira 6y ago
  They don't need to know what my individual preferences are, actually, I would be glad if they don't try to "find them out". Are you sure they're trying to ship what works best for most people? I've not read that anywhere. If they really wanted people to have a choice, they wouldn't be adding configurations that can't be switched on/off through they're preferences menu - like for example, that crazy bar they just added a couple of releases ago - oh.. and which apparently you are not allowed to switch off no more, not even through about:config, according to sibling comment. Also, they have a track record of breaking old configuration options quite often through updates. I am grateful by what they offer - just not sure they're not sneakily changing course, similar to what chrome did.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > Maybe you should be grateful Firefox offers (quite a lot of) customisation opportunities, instead of just posting snarky remarks. That's called user feedback. Users are always right. And looking at Firefox's browser share they are not getting too many new users anymore. Making the life of your existing users a little more miserable does not sound like a very sustainable strategy.

kleiba 6y ago

The biggest item on my wish-list is still a user-option to restore the previous (sensible) click behavior for the address bar: one click places the cursor, double click selects (all, but if I need to triple click for that it would be fine, too). Sadly, this wish will probably not come true any time soon... or ever.

Tomte 6y ago
No, we're not getting it back. I filed a bug, thinking this was an inadvertant side-effect of the new address bar, but it was closed WONTFIX. The old user setting was never really supposed to be used on Windows, just as a workaround for something I don't remember, and the use case is invalid. I still wish I'd get that distinction between single click and double click back.
- kleiba 6y ago
  Yeah, I was aware of that bug report (thanks for filing it). The rationale given is ridiculous, though - anywhere else on my system if I click on a text field, the cursor gets placed where I click and nothing gets selected. It's hard for me to imagine what use case the current behavior is optimized for.
  - roryokane 6y ago
    > It's hard for me to imagine what use case the current behavior is optimized for. I think the current behavior is optimized for people who use the mouse for everything and don’t feel confident enough to edit the URL of the site they’re on. Such people aren’t comfortable with learning new keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-L or Alt-D, so they will notice an increase in speed because they only have to click once to select the URL. I imagine before they were either triple-clicking or clicking once and hitting Ctrl-A. Then those users type the name of the next site they want to visit, completely replacing the current URL, and press Enter to visit it.
cannam 6y ago
Same here - I've pinned my Linux machines to Firefox 74 for the moment, in the no-doubt vain hope that someone upstream will see sense before too long. I was previously using the option (that was removed in Firefox 75) to make the URL bars on the Windows and Mac versions behave in the same way as on Linux - I was really happy to be able to do that, since I've never understood why the single-click-highlight behaviour in some other browsers was supposed to be a good thing. But those Firefox installs are self-updating rather than managed through the package manager, so they got the new behaviour automatically. It's been a couple of months now, but I still don't like it.

PHGamer 6y ago

did they fix the issue with websockets over a forward proxy?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

theandrewbailey 6y ago

Firefox 77 includes AV1 image format[0] support! You'll need to set image.avif.enabled = true in about:config. [0] https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/

nothis 6y ago
Haven't been following this, is there any major site where this makes an impact? Youtube?
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  I doubt that any big site would be affected, since Firefox is the first browser shipping any form of AVIF support, even though most browsers already have AV1.

CaioAlonso 6y ago

I would financially support a fork of Firefox with all the garbage removed. The home page bullshit, Pocket, all the automatic requests made without user action, and more that I probably don't know of.

gonational 6y ago
+100 I will pay $100 annually, but I would need assurances that the telemetry is also 100% removed (no calls home, WHATSOEVER).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nojito 6y ago
And it will soon die off just like every other Firefox fork.
uallo 6y ago
You can easily disable it. Did you try that already? Do you need help?

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

And now my address bar expands on click, because browser.urlbar.update1 was removed from about:config. I knew this day was coming, but I'm still not happy it's here. The movement is distracting, and the alignment of the bar's expanded state is terrible. There's a reason most graphic design follows a grid system. We need a way to turn this off. I realize the old about:config flag was tied to a legacy code pathway, but now Mozilla should implement a new flag. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask.

zozbot234 6y ago
AIUI, you can set the amount of items shown to 0 in about:config, and have what amounts to a non-expanding URL bar. It's not perfect, but it's a viable workaround.
- wtallis 6y ago
  That sounds like you're talking about the dropdown menu that shows up below the URL bar, but the problem is the URL bar itself expands outside of its bounding box when it gets focus.
butz 6y ago
I'll probably try fixing that horrible location bar improvement with some custom userChrome.css https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html#mbarstyler https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b... I already removed some unused items from context menu and it feels great. Sadly, userChrome.css modifications are considered "legacy" and probably one day will be removed. Why can't we have customizable browser UI? I'd prefer Firefox to be more like KDE and less than GNOME (feature and configuration wise). Early versions of Opera had amazing customization options, and now - all browsers are same-ish.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Do you know if there's a way to specify custom userChrome in AutoConfig[1]? I rely on that to keep my customizations consistent across machines—I really don't want this to be a part of my profile. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-autoconfig https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...

huhtenberg 6y ago

This Pocket thing just won't die, would it?

uallo 6y ago
Why would it? A lot of people like and actively use it. If you don't like the integration with Home, you can disable it.

at_a_remove 6y ago

I hope that about:performance has not been nerfed still further. Currently I have an issue wherein some tab, unknown to me, begins using one or more cores at full speed. About:performance allows me only to search by the eco-friendly "energy" usage bit, which somehow does not reveal which tab is doing it. I kill off the most active tabs according to that stat, nothing happens. And so I have had to default back to killing off a process and guessing which tab has crashed.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

MikusR 6y ago

For me his release broke uBlock Origin (Dashboard shows only menu without options and doesn't block anything), Twitter doesn't load, Reddit doesn't load

MikusR 6y ago
More reports: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gv765v/firefox_770_see_all_new_features_updates_and_fixes/fsnxmr1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gv765v/firefox_770... https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/gv9uwt/firefox_770_update_appears_to_have_removed_many/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/gv9uwt/firefox... https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gvc7zd/none_of_my_extensions_work_now_with_firefox_77/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gvc7zd/none_of_my_...

0x006A 6y ago

Why remove config options and force some UI that clearly people are not happy with? I can not type in a url without showing the most visited sites? At least let me press ctrl-l or click in the url bar and start typing before showing me helpful information, trying to enter a new URL, I really do not want to see the most common sites again and again and again and again! Is Firefox trying to kill the long tail of the internet and get everyone to just visit the top 5 sites?

jimmaswell 6y ago
UI teams universally think they know better than all the users they force their "improvements" onto.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
"Why remove [the] config [option]" is easily answered in this case. When Mozilla changed the address bar, they also rewrote a lot of overall address bar code, and the old about:config flag activated the old code pathway—it wasn't just a simple design tweak. You don't want to have all that old code sticking around in Firefox. What we need is a new flag that changes the design specifically.
nojito 6y ago
>some UI that clearly people are not happy with? Because swinging and appeasing the vocal minority is not sustainable.

RandomBacon 6y ago

People keep recommending Brave, but I keep countering with Firefox. It's getting a lot harder to convince people when Firefox is doubling-down on BS like the expanding address bar, integrating articles/ads, telemetry, etc. When I see Brave recommendations, they're primarily because of it's built-in ad-blocking. People value sanity. Don't introduce more visual distractions (essentially what the average person gets from an ad; they see it as a visual thing, they don't comprehend tracking and resource management like we do). Make Firefox clean, make it so that it can be easily recommended. When Chrome came out, people were excited because it was simple and sleek. It's okay to learn from competitors, don't let hubris be the downfall!

sfink 6y ago
I think a lot of people agree. And a lot of other people are pissed off about Firefox following Chrome's lead in stripping everything down visually. There's a solution, though -- as it happens, I happen to have the best opinion on this. Like, always the best. So really the Firefox designers should just ask me. I would think they would appreciate being able to confidently say that they're always doing the right thing?
- reitanqild 6y ago
  You made me chuckle :-) I have the same superskill. We could make a consulting agency and people would pay us good money to know exactly how stuff should be done.

Normille 6y ago

@Mozilla: Wake me up when you bring back text-reflow. It's only been 9 years... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710298 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710298

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

To all who aren't happy with the way FX is going, may I suggest palemoon. I've been using it a long while and it's just straighforwardly good. http://www.palemoon.org/ http://www.palemoon.org/ Perhaps the easiest way of letting Mozilla know how you feel is by helping them lose market share to another. PM is a good browser. Not affiliated, it just works for me.

smnthermes 6y ago
Good suggestion. People shouldn't believe the FUD spread by Firefox fanboys: 1. http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml 2. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270 3. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399 4. https://old.reddit.com/r/palemoon/comments/evywwj/how_secure_is_pm_really/ffzc5iw/ https://old.reddit.com/r/palemoon/comments/evywwj/how_secure...
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Interesting. I didn't know this. BTW I wonder where the assorted silent downvotes are coming from - just from my suggesting an alternative browser and your posting useful info.

accountinhn 6y ago

Part I never get is how and when did we got into the mindset of, open source means free and the backlash Mozilla receives for trying to monetize their product. Either I'm reading too much in-between the lines or I'm missing something.

user48372 6y ago

I’m sick of Firefox megabar. I’ve downgraded Firefox to the 76.0.1 already. It’s time to switch to another browser. Can you suggest any good ones? Or there is only one choice left?