19 ms·

Firefox 78

403 points by agurk 6y ago

agurk 6y ago
Of note for those using Wayland/Mutter Firefox 78 now has the option of Partial Present[0] and better supported VA-API for video playback. Interestingly there was a recently discovered Mutter bug[1] where the Culling code to prevent rendering of windows that were not visible was not working. This fix will need to be deployed to see the biggest benefit of Partial Present. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1620076 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1620076 [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Broken-Culling-Fix https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Br...
- guerrilla 6y ago
  When did they start supporting VA-API? I didn't notice. Lacking that was one of the reasons I got a new computer.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    With this release
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      Oh that's wonderful. I'll get back some of the CPU of my new computer. I've pretty much have a core dedicated to it.
      - agurk 6y ago
        It's slightly more complex as there are some hardware/software combinations that don't work. This article gives some good steps to make sure it's enabled: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-gets-va-api-on-wayland/ https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor... I've also had to disable media.ffvpx.enabled in previous versions to enable VA-API for more than just VP9 (I haven't yet been able to verify if it's needed for this one).
Yizahi 6y ago
Does it still have UglyBar from v77? Seems like that.
- akerro 6y ago
  Unfortunately it still has this "megabar"
- msclrhd 6y ago
  See https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b... for details on how to customize the new address bar, including userChrome css for keeping its size confined to the dropdown UI like other dropdown/combobox UI elements.
  - jamoes 6y ago
    Also see https://superuser.com/questions/540851/go-back-to-not-selecting-the-whole-url-when-i-click-the-address-bar/1559926#1559926 https://superuser.com/questions/540851/go-back-to-not-select... for details on how to disable the clickSelectsAll behavior. This issue is frankly far more important than the style changes they made. It's a muscle-memory issue that drastically affects daily usage. I was so desperate to restore the sane behavior of not selecting everything on a single click that I was recompiling firefox prior to discovering this workaround.
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Can I ask why it's considered "ugly" now but wasn't before? Isn't it just a few pixels bigger?
  - jeltz 6y ago
    No, it is smaller so that is not the issue. The old completions used to use up the full width of the browser window. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I suspect that the proportions are just slightly off.
    - 6y ago
Someone1234 6y ago
If anyone at Mozilla is reading, your Security Fixes link 404s. It will be here when it is released: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-24/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-2...
- coldpie 6y ago
  I think this happens every release, although I don't know why. Probably just different teams pushing the button at different times.
bzb3 6y ago
Firefox 78 will be the new ESR. That unfortunately sets the new, ugly omnibar in stone.
- tandr 6y ago
  https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx has some tweaks to make it less annoying.
  - amazing_stories 6y ago
    Once I saw the only way to fix this terrible MegaBar was by modifying code that will break later I realized I was no longer the target demographic and switched browsers.
    - NikkiA 6y ago
      As someone likewise feeling disenfranchised by FF, what did you switch to?
Aissen 6y ago
Bitter-sweet seeing new Pocket features in there, knowing that the service is still proprietary more than 3 years after its acquisition. If Mozilla wants to become a service company, it should just say so: https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75 https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75
osrec 6y ago
I really want to use Firefox, but their dev tools are lacking in so many ways when compared to Chrome. Fix that, and perhaps even improve on a few things that Chrome does badly (e.g. JS profiling in the "performance" tab of Chrome dev tools gives you zero information about which functions are responsible for the overhead), and you'll have me converted. I've been wanting to ditch Chrome for ages, but have no suitable alternative for development. Edit: I've been asked for examples where FF dev tools are lacking, so copying from another comment of mine below: 1) Chrome CPU profiler will display the amount of time taken against calls in line in your source JS files. FF does not do this. 2) Memory snapshots in FF are not sortable, and do not show distance. 3) Performance tab in Chrome allows CPU throttling, FF does not. 4) Performance tab in Chrome also captures much more info, such as node count, heap size, number of listeners, GPU memory. All the above are very useful if you're building a high performance web app or library.
- uallo 6y ago
  > their dev tools are lacking in so many ways when compared to Chrome Like what for example? Please be specific.
  - osrec 6y ago
    A few off the top of my head: 1) Chrome CPU profiler will display the amount of time taken against calls in line in your source JS files. FF does not do this. 2) Memory snapshots in FF are not sortable, and do not show distance. 3) Performance tab in Chrome allows CPU throttling, FF does not. 4) Performance tab in Chrome also captures much more info, such as node count, heap size, number of listeners, GPU memory. All the above are very useful if you're building a high performance web app or library.
- tarkin2 6y ago
  I use Firefox for dev, then occasionally use chrome dev tools for performance. I have to develop for both, so having both open isn’t burdensome.
- Latty 6y ago
  Firefox's tooling for CSS flexbox/grid has been much stronger than Chrome's for some time. I haven't noticed anything missing from the dev tools since they added proper websocket support a while back.
akerro 6y ago
Pocket is great and totally deserves more promotion. I know this will trigger a lot of people saying it's spyware, I used to think that too, but then I embraced it and it's great for bookmarking, syncthing tabs, reading news as podcasts on mobile etc. It's great.
- logeekal 6y ago
  Totally agreed. Pocket is amazing it has changed mobile reading for me.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Something being spyware and you embracing it seem orthogonal. Are you saying it is spyware (not an argument I've seen before) but you choose to use it anyway?
  - whereistimbo 6y ago
    It was a third party app and the forced bundling feels like a bloatware. Now Mozilla Corporation owns it, it doesn't really a concern anymore.
  - JadeNB 6y ago
    I'm not sure about the claims about spyware—I suspect akerro was simply reporting on the general feeling of the complaints, rather than using precise language—but I know that there was a loud outcry from people unhappy that the proprietary service Pocket was integrated as a part of the core browser, rather than as an extension, which seemed not to be consonant with the stated Mozilla mission to openness and transparency; and that, at least initially, there were no switches to get rid of it. (I don't remember the exact situation now, but whatever it is is the result of Mozilla giving in in response to lots of user push-back against the forced integration.)
  - akerro 6y ago
    I said other people will call it spyware, because they don't understand how and it works and what it does.
Santosh83 6y ago
Great. Unlike many, I walk my talk and have always used Firefox since more than a decade with no exceptions. The very commonly given reason that DevTools are better in Chrome still doesn't stop one from using Firefox for all other general browsing. Unless we support alternatives we really shouldn't complain when they gradually die off in a space that is increasingly coming under the control of giant corporations with bottomless pockets.
- logeekal 6y ago
  I love to use Firefox and run away from Chrome but but but... Firefox never matches the perfomace with chrome in windows. Although, in linux Firefox FTW.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I use Firefox as my main browser, in Windows 10. Its performance doesn't seem any worse than Chromium-based browsers. Looking at [0], it seems Firefox sometimes outperforms Chrome/Chromium, and sometimes loses, depending on what's being tested. [0] https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      For me performance is better than chrome by a long shot now. Used to be FF was a memory hog and got slow and clunky. Now if I have 5 windows and 30+ tabs open for days, chrome will slow to a crawl while FF will happily continue to run at the same speed as if 1 tab was open.
- logicprog 6y ago
  I switched to Firefox a few years ago and it's great. Never looked back. I didn't even do it for ideological reasons like you and others, either, since I'm fine with Google.
  - slowmovintarget 6y ago
snide 6y ago
I recently tried to move to Firefox (again). I try to to this every couple years. I run into the same three blockers every time. 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. 2. The dev tools aren't as good. I mostly work in the frontend, and simple things like how you write css overwrites with tab completion is just not as good in Firefox. 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. It doesn't help that I pair this yearly experiment with DDG as my search. With that pairing I often run into autocompletion / omnibar issues and find myself just banging !g to get myself out of it. I really would like to switch, but the gap is too much for my daily tooling. I say this as someone who recently switched to Linux from OSX and really ran into no issues outside of having to spend a week setting thing up how I liked.
- lewiscollard 6y ago
  > 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. That's interesting, because I have found rather the opposite, for how I use it. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequented sites; with Firefox I find it much easier to find that thing I was reading a few weeks back that I did not bookmark by searching a word from the title. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequent and/or very most recently visited sites.
  - snide 6y ago
    This might be true. I need to the two things out of my bar at the moment: (a) going to those 10 sites i always go to very quickly (b) to run a search on some linux/css/react thing. Chrome does really well there, no matter what config settings I change in Firefox. For the deep history I'm a pinboard user and bookmark at least a dozen things daily with tags.
  - s9w 6y ago
    Yeah the FF bar completion is lightyears ahead of chromes. Chrome massively favors searches over history matches. I revisit every couple of months but it always is comically unusable for me. To the point where I visit only about 3 sites with my chrome, and even when I write the first 3 letters of a 4 word domain the default action is still a google search (with the correct site listed beneath but not default selected). edit: So I just opened my very secondary chrome. I use it for Youtube listening mostly. When I enter "hand co" to find my often listened "hand covers bruise" song, I get 7 (!) google searches, and the 8th and last entry is the Youtube link.
DanCarvajal 6y ago
I see their still pushing Pocket recommendations, I still find that choice baffling.
- uallo 6y ago
  > I still find that choice baffling Why?
  - DanCarvajal 6y ago
    Why would I want content recommendations from my browser, especially Firefox? It's an utterly bizarre feature to ad. It didn't make sense for Google to have done it but it especially didn't make sense for Mozilla to play the "me too" game. It's a waste of money and developer resources and frankly shows poor stewardship on the part of management.
    - uallo 6y ago
      Then disable it. Judging from comments in this post, there seem to be numerous people who like it. And given Mozilla owns Pocket and a small amount of revenue is coming from it, what is wrong with pushing it?
      - DanCarvajal 6y ago
        Because at the same time they've struggled to move past the Gecko engine and create a product that can reasonable keep up with Google Chrome. It was the wrong choice made at the worst time, wasting time and resources.
        uallo 6y ago
        Are you saying that the people working on the engine and the ones working on Pocket are the same? Hint: Probably not.
        6y ago
kleiba 6y ago
OT: I would like to write an extension that restores the previous clicking behavior on the title and search bars but I have never written a Firefox extension before. Does anyone know if this kind of functionality change would even be possible with the current extension framework?
- jraph 6y ago
  I would not expect this. One of the main points of removing the old way of doing extensions was to stop allowing extensions to arbitrarily modify the browser's UI, which was difficult to maintain.
jiggawatts 6y ago
Wow, they finally got around to fixing a certificate-handling issue. That must have closed a bunch of decade-old bugzilla issues. Now if they could just get around to supporting intermediate CA certificates and all of the Windows certificate stores, not just a couple of randomly chosen ones, that would be swell. Also, IPv6 support in PAC files would be nice. If any Mozilla employees come to YC News: Unimportant-seeming stuff like this is why Chrome crushed Firefox in the Enterprise.
- monus 6y ago
  I have resisted using anything other than Firefox since the IE days but I have been literally forced to switch to Chrome because of this issue on my work Macs and every time I checked, I was surprised to see that’s not implemented. Finally. Thank you Mozilla!
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  > Unimportant-seeming stuff like this is why Chrome crushed Firefox in the Enterprise. This isn't why. At work I deal with two different vendors who refuse to troubleshoot any issues with their products on anything but Chrome. To this day, the issue has never been a browser compatibility issue, but we have to actually temporarily give the user a Chromium-based browser just to get a modicum of decent support these days. Both vendors, of course, tell us we should just use Chrome because it's the only browser they support. (Even though other browsers work fine.) And unfortunately, most IT staffers end up getting directed by superiors to follow said instructions.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    We got Firefox in the first place due to insubordination by developers, many of whom were told that we were only going to support IE. But it was easier to debug on Mozilla so it got supported first because you could eliminate 90% of the bugs before ever having to touch IE.
  - acdha 6y ago
    > This isn't why. At work I deal with two different vendors who refuse to troubleshoot any issues with their products on anything but Chrome. This is the case now but a decade ago, in the period the original poster was talking about, it was because of things like what they mentioned: Mozilla needed some attention to detail on those tickets, a robust MSI install package, and a polished policy deployment system. Lots of large shops deployed it but it wasn't loved because there was always some wart to work around.
batsoupremacy 6y ago
one of the reasons why i love firefox? the Tracking protection. it makes webpages faster to load. Cool
- Markoff 6y ago
  ublock origin makes pages load faster I'm curious why it is still not built in instead other nonsense they integrate
  - mxschumacher 6y ago
    Google would not allow Mozilla to do this
    - shultays 6y ago
      How? Do you mean they would cancel their search deal? Does Google have any power over Mozilla?
      - mxschumacher 6y ago
        If past revenue numbers are any indication [0], then Google as a lot of power of Mozilla. They are privacy focused, so I suppose they don't make money through the sale of personal data; also their services are free. Unless there is some other revenue source I'm missing, there seems to be a significant dependency on search engines and similar partners. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Firefox's Tracking Protection is a fraud and has a whitelist of domains to allow, which include Google and Facebook properties despite them being the biggest threats to privacy.
adrian17 6y ago
> Wasm Multi-value is now supported, meaning that WebAssembly functions can now return multiple values, and instruction sequences can consume and produce multiple stack values The linked description, while great, is half a year old and focuses on technical aspects of parts of the toolchain. How far are we currently from being able to enable this in normal builds of Rust or C++? EDIT: seems like I can enable this in nightly rustc by passing `-C target-feature=+multivalue`.
emerged 6y ago
Does anyone know if there's a way to stop Firefox giving me "http://weather/" http://weather/" as the first suggestion when typing 'weather' in the address bar? I have never in my life wanted to visit weather.com but I can't seem to make Firefox stop suggesting it. It doesn't do this for other keywords.
- msclrhd 6y ago
  If you have that in your history, you can highlight that entry in the search results (e.g. using the up/down arrow keys after typing "weather") then press Shift and Delete to delete it from the history. If you don't want search results, you can go to the options/preferences, select search, and uncheck the "Provide search suggestions" option.
  - impassionedrule 6y ago
    This key combo doesn't work
    - emerged 6y ago
      It doesn't work for me either. It comes up as a solution whenever I try to solve this particular problem but it doesn't work for some reason.
    - toyg 6y ago
      try searching for the item in your History sidebar, then right-click -> Forget about this site.
      - jniedrauer 6y ago
        I've done this and the OPs suggestion, and the incorrect autocomplete persists. In my case, I went to a random person's blog that starts with the same two letters as a website I use frequently. I've given that random person's blog thousands of hits over the last year...
askjdlkasdjsd 6y ago
Hate to be cynical, but I feel like they're just releasing a new one every week just to stay in the news.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  They are on a 6 week release cycle. Every 6 weeks they release the changes that are ready. Sometimes the changes are large, sometimes small. Over time, rapid releases tend to get new features out sooner than delayed releases. Don’t get hung up on the version number. It doesn’t mean this is a major release, it is just the 78th release in a series.
  - executesorder66 6y ago
    They changed it to a 4 week release cycle.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Netscape 1.x and NCSA Mosaic were originally on a ~6 week release cycle. This is just returning to your roots. I think we have this revisionist history where the signers to the Agile Manifesto invented these processes from whole cloth, when it's more accurate to think of it as 80% curated list of existing practices, >10% discovered, <10% invented. I ran a Kanban board in 1995, and I wouldn't learn about Deming, Goldratt or Ohno for another ten years. I think a couple people were upset or at least perplexed by my 'yeah ok' reaction to some of their revelations.
- Jallal 6y ago
  Last release was done on June 2, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/77.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/77.0/releasenotes/ The previous one was done on May 5, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/76.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/76.0/releasenotes/ And the one before on April 7, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/ More or less, one release per month. Hardly "every week".
caution 6y ago
New in Firefox 78: DevTools improvements, new regex engine, and abundant web platform updates https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-78/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-78/
noisy_boy 6y ago
I am a pretty ardent Firefox supporter and prefer it over Chrome but some of the issues are still jarring and really affect the user experience. E.g. this 10 year old bug which I still have to deal with multiple times every month where if you have couple of windows open with one having pinned tabs and close the other one first, the pinned tabs are not restored upon restart: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587400 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587400 Mozilla needs to shift focus, atleast briefly if not long term, to work on squashing such common issues instead of racing to add new features.
- izolate 6y ago
  Agreed. I'm tracking a 7 year old bug to support `<input type="month" />` that's probably an easy win, given the foundation work is completed by supporting other date input formats. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320
  - clairity 6y ago
    yah, i would love it if mozilla focused on all kinds of form controls, bringing them to parity styling-wise, adding more hooks for things like validation/more complex interactions, adding common controls (like month), etc. basically, they should look at the various web ui toolkits like bootstrap and integrate all the controls and behaviors common across all of them. it would be such a major win for developers and users.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      Maybe Mozilla should stop the features and branding for a little while and make a revamp sprint ?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    I have a 20 year old feature request to support "if type is text/plain (maybe text/*) and firefox brings up the download box, add the option to just view it in the browser in the first place". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 (this has become less relevant in recent years as "everyone" uses github to present source to the world, and websites in general vanish in favour of social media)
jadbox 6y ago
Just tested Firefox 79.0b1 with webrender.all and surprisingly it's performing leaps over Chrome on Win10 Intel GPU. In the below image, left side is Firefox Developer Edition and right is Chrome 83.0.4103.116 on Windows 10 on a Dell XPS. https://i.redd.it/6gaj12tlh2851.png https://i.redd.it/6gaj12tlh2851.png
abmobi 6y ago
Firefox has slowly crawled back into my daily workflow of development as well as general browsing with the 67.0 release mid last year or so, that brought in major performance improvements. Though there is one caveat that bothers me a lot. When auto restoring sessions after I've closed Firefox and launch it the next day, it restores the same tabs, but with the old data (for eg., youtube or twitch live channels / searches). Every tab needs to be refreshed manually to get the new data, which Chrome automatically does.
- clairity 6y ago
  i prefer this behavior, as i often want to see the "old" version of pages that i had been looking at before and avoid a barrage of network requests at startup. in any case, i'm pretty sure there's an about:config setting to change it.
furbyhater 6y ago
"We've disabled old TLS connections and insecure cipher-schemes, so websites which used to work will now display an error" doesn't really sound like an improvement for the user. I'd rather see a warning detailing the situation and asking me if I want to proceed (maybe I don't care about encryption when visiting the particular site).
- kbrosnan 6y ago
  There has been a bypassable error for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 for several months. There have been error messages in devtools. In October of 2018 the browser vendors jointly announced that this change was coming. [1][2] This is happening in coordination with Chrome. The sites that are affected by this have had nearly 2 years to sort out their upgrade to TLS 1.2 or 1.3. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old-versions-of-tls/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old-ve... [2] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/chrome-ui-for-deprecating-legacy-tls.html https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/chrome-ui-for-deprecating-...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > The sites that are affected by this have had nearly 2 years to sort out their upgrade to TLS 1.2 or 1.3. ... or are hardware appliances with a management interface, segregated on an internal VLAN, that will never be updated, but which were helpfully "forward thinking" enough to force HTTPS.
- driverdan 6y ago
  Unfortunately most users don't have enough knowledge to make an informed decision like that. It's better to keep users secure by disabling insecure ciphers.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Is for your own good comrade!
vehemenz 6y ago
Firefox shows the full URL, fully supports multiple Google accounts, and is the only browser that has temporary container tabs. I'm surprised Chrome users tolerate soft paywalls or having to constantly clear their cache. It's a basic feature every browser should have in 2020.
gganley 6y ago
So I'm on macOS using Safari for web browsing, chrome for work (web app + backend). I'm on the younger side so chrome has been omnipresent. I do not mean to understate the importance of privacy in the modern web, so don't misunderstand my question. Why would someone, as a developer and a user, want to use Firefox over Safari (mostly) and Chrome (for work).
- tandr 6y ago
  1. uBlock Origin, and some other extensions. 2. Ability to tweak css a bit, and get multi-row tabs (that was primary reason for me)
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > I do not mean to understate the importance of privacy in the modern web > Why would someone, as a developer and a user, want to use Firefox over Safari (mostly) and Chrome (for work). You wrote the answer before the question. Safari might have users' best interest at heart, but anything that stops an advertising company's browser from dominating the market is a good thing.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    You made me think of Drew's last blog entry: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/26/Vendor-purpose-OS.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/26/Vendor-purpose-OS.html Maybe we need to coin "vendor-purpose browser" as well? All of the big three are, to some extent. And now, one has to think of the motives behind each vendor. Hint: I'll stay on Firefox. And I even use other browsers sometimes, that just support some HTML (elinks, dillo...) on underpowered systems. Maybe we just need more underpowered systems?
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  As a web developer you should be using all browsers, maybe not the more obscure ones, but the big 3 for sure
atombender 6y ago
I switched from Brave to Firefox recently, and I'm very happy! I perceive it as faster, and feature-wise it's pretty much equivalent. It's made some enormous performance improvements. Firefox still has some rough issues. It doesn't always feel like a native app (e.g. form fields, toolbar, preferences), and its visual touches (e.g. the main toolbar) are sometimes heavy-handed. In other areas, such as the "omnibar" behaviour, it's still catching up to other browsers, but at least it's catching up. Another thing I dislike is just how much tweaking I had to do to remove quirks. For example, Firefox has some really excessive animations, which fortunately can be turned off ("ui.prefersReducedMotion" in "about:config"). Firefox has some ways to go, but I'm a lot more optimistic about its future than I used to be.
- Munky-Necan 6y ago
  I tried to use Brave for a little bit, but it felt like I was apart of a meme. The browser is fine, but it felt invasive and awkward. I can't put my finger on why it made me feel this way; something was just... off. Firefox and Safari are my two main stays now. Both have privacy focus, although one takes privacy significantly more seriously. They are both phenomenal browsers in my opinion.
defnotashton2 6y ago
I want to use Firefox but find the plug in system to be unusable and therefore prefer a chromium based solution. I have 30+extensions, many developer based, many for privacy and blocking, and many new ones to prevent sites from dictating my behavior like blocking copy and pasting of text. But the most important one is a plug in manager that allows me to to toggle on/off individual plug-ins from the sidebar with two clicks. FFs plug in page is atrocious. It's a Giant infinite scroll page that takes several clicks to do anything and I don't think ctrl f works so I have to scroll and look.. Nope. I just can't. In an age where the web is becoming more hostile to users by hiding and controlling the info, and forcing things like amqp, I think plug-ins are really the only override to enable user agency and Firefox plug in management is very immature.
- findjashua 6y ago
  you can set keyboard shortcuts to toggle the add-ons. Yes, you do have to go through the single page as you mentioned, but it's a one-time thing. Personally, I can't leave Firefox due to: 1. Sidebery (on Desktop) 2. Night-mode (on Mobile)
  - renjimen 6y ago
    Sidebery - wow! I'd looked for a vertical tab add-on to no avail last year, but this is incredible. Thanks. It still boggles my mind that everything is made to go horizontal on default Windows/Mac UIs when desktops are widescreen and most content we consume now is tall and thin.
    - findjashua 6y ago
      Yep! Firefox supports vertical sidebars (which Chrome doesn't I guess?), so you find a lot of Firefox add-ons for vertical tree-style tab sidebars. Sidebery is my favorite by far, because it also lets you organize the tabs in "panels", and lets you set keyboard shortcuts for navigating across panels. So you don't end up with a giant list of 50 tabs. Eg I have 1 panel for email/chat/music, and a separate panel for each task I'm working on. Makes things a lot more manageable, since each panel usually has only 5-10 tabs.
interfixus 6y ago
So ... "Close tabs to the right" and "Close other tabs" moved from top level context menu to submenu "Close Multiple Tabs". This is the kind of ungraceful UI degradation which would send me packing if there was anywhere else decent to go.
- mmphosis 6y ago
  Wow. Right-click on a tab. I didn't even know that menu existed.
logie17 6y ago
Very nice - the PIP functionality is something I've been looking forward to with more browser support.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
My Firefox's About page says I'm running Firefox 77.0.1, and that my browser is up-to-date. Is it because I'm running OS X 10.9, and they're planning to migrate me to ESR but the ESR build isn't out yet or something? Because I'm on 10.9, and I know my system is vulnerable, I always try to update to the latest release very quickly.
- Hemospectrum 6y ago
  According to IRC rumors, automatic updates are delayed for a bit after the release is announced. Not sure if this is due to CDN replication or some other issue. At any rate, you can get the update faster by downloading and installing it manually.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I expected some delay as it was rolled out, but it's now five hours later and I still haven't gotten it. I think I will indeed need to do a manual download, although I'm kind of curious how long it will take at this point.
oblib 6y ago
My old Mac Mini is getting left behind here. I dread the thought of buying a newer one but everyday it's getting closer to a necessity.
lucb1e 6y ago
Anyone know what this means? > We fixed bugs in the search results quality composition and improved search result texts based on recommendations by our partners. It sounds like Firefox has its own search engine? Do they mean the browser history+bookmark search feature? Or the search query suggestions when you have third-party autocomplete turned on? What "partners" (this sounds very markety) is this about?
ryuukk_ 6y ago
nice, user share dropped again this month :)
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Firefox is great. All I want from it now is to have tabs smaller than 50px and to have CSS property backdrop-filter finally enabled to have those niiiice blurred backgrounds.
jetofff 6y ago
Does anybody here actually dislike Firefox (as a daily driver or in webdev)?
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  I don't like the constant UI changes, the ugly configuration menus, the new bar and the bundling of stuff nobody asked for like Pocket.
akulbe 6y ago
Interesting. I don't see anything about it in the Release Notes, but Help > About Firefox would normally offer the latest update. Mine is saying 77.0.1 is up to date.
jaipilot747 6y ago
On Firefox for Android Beta, the default seems to be to opt-in, to share "Marketing data" with their mobile marketing vendor, Leanplum. This caught me by surprise and can be changed in the Settings -> Data collection menu.
syspec 6y ago
Ironically it's kind of a shame, but I feel that the success of Firebug ended up hurting Firefox in the long run. Firebug was really a pioneer in the devtools, but for so long Firefox just allowed it to be the defacto Dev tools that google ended up lapping them. And they we made to play catch up Once developers started jumping, they convinced slowly got their relatives or non techs friends to switch.
- kjsingh 6y ago
  My mom got new Win10 laptop and I made her install Firefox only
chrisdengso 6y ago
Killing it
alibert 6y ago
FYI, the 78 update has been pulled off (0) due to a bug (1). [0] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3062694 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3062694 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1649393 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1649393

403 points by agurk 6y ago

Of note for those using Wayland/Mutter Firefox 78 now has the option of Partial Present[0] and better supported VA-API for video playback. Interestingly there was a recently discovered Mutter bug[1] where the Culling code to prevent rendering of windows that were not visible was not working. This fix will need to be deployed to see the biggest benefit of Partial Present. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1620076 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1620076 [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Broken-Culling-Fix https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Br...

guerrilla 6y ago
When did they start supporting VA-API? I didn't notice. Lacking that was one of the reasons I got a new computer.
- techntoke 6y ago
  With this release
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Oh that's wonderful. I'll get back some of the CPU of my new computer. I've pretty much have a core dedicated to it.
    - agurk 6y ago
      It's slightly more complex as there are some hardware/software combinations that don't work. This article gives some good steps to make sure it's enabled: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-gets-va-api-on-wayland/ https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor... I've also had to disable media.ffvpx.enabled in previous versions to enable VA-API for more than just VP9 (I haven't yet been able to verify if it's needed for this one).

Yizahi 6y ago

Does it still have UglyBar from v77? Seems like that.

akerro 6y ago
Unfortunately it still has this "megabar"
msclrhd 6y ago
See https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b... for details on how to customize the new address bar, including userChrome css for keeping its size confined to the dropdown UI like other dropdown/combobox UI elements.
- jamoes 6y ago
  Also see https://superuser.com/questions/540851/go-back-to-not-selecting-the-whole-url-when-i-click-the-address-bar/1559926#1559926 https://superuser.com/questions/540851/go-back-to-not-select... for details on how to disable the clickSelectsAll behavior. This issue is frankly far more important than the style changes they made. It's a muscle-memory issue that drastically affects daily usage. I was so desperate to restore the sane behavior of not selecting everything on a single click that I was recompiling firefox prior to discovering this workaround.
ChrisSD 6y ago
Can I ask why it's considered "ugly" now but wasn't before? Isn't it just a few pixels bigger?
- jeltz 6y ago
  No, it is smaller so that is not the issue. The old completions used to use up the full width of the browser window. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I suspect that the proportions are just slightly off.
  - 6y ago

Someone1234 6y ago

If anyone at Mozilla is reading, your Security Fixes link 404s. It will be here when it is released: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-24/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-2...

coldpie 6y ago
I think this happens every release, although I don't know why. Probably just different teams pushing the button at different times.

bzb3 6y ago

Firefox 78 will be the new ESR. That unfortunately sets the new, ugly omnibar in stone.

tandr 6y ago
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx has some tweaks to make it less annoying.
- amazing_stories 6y ago
  Once I saw the only way to fix this terrible MegaBar was by modifying code that will break later I realized I was no longer the target demographic and switched browsers.
  - NikkiA 6y ago
    As someone likewise feeling disenfranchised by FF, what did you switch to?

Aissen 6y ago

Bitter-sweet seeing new Pocket features in there, knowing that the service is still proprietary more than 3 years after its acquisition. If Mozilla wants to become a service company, it should just say so: https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75 https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75

osrec 6y ago

I really want to use Firefox, but their dev tools are lacking in so many ways when compared to Chrome. Fix that, and perhaps even improve on a few things that Chrome does badly (e.g. JS profiling in the "performance" tab of Chrome dev tools gives you zero information about which functions are responsible for the overhead), and you'll have me converted. I've been wanting to ditch Chrome for ages, but have no suitable alternative for development. Edit: I've been asked for examples where FF dev tools are lacking, so copying from another comment of mine below: 1) Chrome CPU profiler will display the amount of time taken against calls in line in your source JS files. FF does not do this. 2) Memory snapshots in FF are not sortable, and do not show distance. 3) Performance tab in Chrome allows CPU throttling, FF does not. 4) Performance tab in Chrome also captures much more info, such as node count, heap size, number of listeners, GPU memory. All the above are very useful if you're building a high performance web app or library.

uallo 6y ago
> their dev tools are lacking in so many ways when compared to Chrome Like what for example? Please be specific.
- osrec 6y ago
  A few off the top of my head: 1) Chrome CPU profiler will display the amount of time taken against calls in line in your source JS files. FF does not do this. 2) Memory snapshots in FF are not sortable, and do not show distance. 3) Performance tab in Chrome allows CPU throttling, FF does not. 4) Performance tab in Chrome also captures much more info, such as node count, heap size, number of listeners, GPU memory. All the above are very useful if you're building a high performance web app or library.
tarkin2 6y ago
I use Firefox for dev, then occasionally use chrome dev tools for performance. I have to develop for both, so having both open isn’t burdensome.
Latty 6y ago
Firefox's tooling for CSS flexbox/grid has been much stronger than Chrome's for some time. I haven't noticed anything missing from the dev tools since they added proper websocket support a while back.

akerro 6y ago

Pocket is great and totally deserves more promotion. I know this will trigger a lot of people saying it's spyware, I used to think that too, but then I embraced it and it's great for bookmarking, syncthing tabs, reading news as podcasts on mobile etc. It's great.

logeekal 6y ago
Totally agreed. Pocket is amazing it has changed mobile reading for me.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Something being spyware and you embracing it seem orthogonal. Are you saying it is spyware (not an argument I've seen before) but you choose to use it anyway?
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  It was a third party app and the forced bundling feels like a bloatware. Now Mozilla Corporation owns it, it doesn't really a concern anymore.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  I'm not sure about the claims about spyware—I suspect akerro was simply reporting on the general feeling of the complaints, rather than using precise language—but I know that there was a loud outcry from people unhappy that the proprietary service Pocket was integrated as a part of the core browser, rather than as an extension, which seemed not to be consonant with the stated Mozilla mission to openness and transparency; and that, at least initially, there were no switches to get rid of it. (I don't remember the exact situation now, but whatever it is is the result of Mozilla giving in in response to lots of user push-back against the forced integration.)
- akerro 6y ago
  I said other people will call it spyware, because they don't understand how and it works and what it does.

Santosh83 6y ago

Great. Unlike many, I walk my talk and have always used Firefox since more than a decade with no exceptions. The very commonly given reason that DevTools are better in Chrome still doesn't stop one from using Firefox for all other general browsing. Unless we support alternatives we really shouldn't complain when they gradually die off in a space that is increasingly coming under the control of giant corporations with bottomless pockets.

logeekal 6y ago
I love to use Firefox and run away from Chrome but but but... Firefox never matches the perfomace with chrome in windows. Although, in linux Firefox FTW.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I use Firefox as my main browser, in Windows 10. Its performance doesn't seem any worse than Chromium-based browsers. Looking at [0], it seems Firefox sometimes outperforms Chrome/Chromium, and sometimes loses, depending on what's being tested. [0] https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    For me performance is better than chrome by a long shot now. Used to be FF was a memory hog and got slow and clunky. Now if I have 5 windows and 30+ tabs open for days, chrome will slow to a crawl while FF will happily continue to run at the same speed as if 1 tab was open.
logicprog 6y ago
I switched to Firefox a few years ago and it's great. Never looked back. I didn't even do it for ideological reasons like you and others, either, since I'm fine with Google.
- slowmovintarget 6y ago

snide 6y ago

I recently tried to move to Firefox (again). I try to to this every couple years. I run into the same three blockers every time. 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. 2. The dev tools aren't as good. I mostly work in the frontend, and simple things like how you write css overwrites with tab completion is just not as good in Firefox. 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. It doesn't help that I pair this yearly experiment with DDG as my search. With that pairing I often run into autocompletion / omnibar issues and find myself just banging !g to get myself out of it. I really would like to switch, but the gap is too much for my daily tooling. I say this as someone who recently switched to Linux from OSX and really ran into no issues outside of having to spend a week setting thing up how I liked.

lewiscollard 6y ago
> 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. That's interesting, because I have found rather the opposite, for how I use it. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequented sites; with Firefox I find it much easier to find that thing I was reading a few weeks back that I did not bookmark by searching a word from the title. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequent and/or very most recently visited sites.
- snide 6y ago
  This might be true. I need to the two things out of my bar at the moment: (a) going to those 10 sites i always go to very quickly (b) to run a search on some linux/css/react thing. Chrome does really well there, no matter what config settings I change in Firefox. For the deep history I'm a pinboard user and bookmark at least a dozen things daily with tags.
- s9w 6y ago
  Yeah the FF bar completion is lightyears ahead of chromes. Chrome massively favors searches over history matches. I revisit every couple of months but it always is comically unusable for me. To the point where I visit only about 3 sites with my chrome, and even when I write the first 3 letters of a 4 word domain the default action is still a google search (with the correct site listed beneath but not default selected). edit: So I just opened my very secondary chrome. I use it for Youtube listening mostly. When I enter "hand co" to find my often listened "hand covers bruise" song, I get 7 (!) google searches, and the 8th and last entry is the Youtube link.

DanCarvajal 6y ago

I see their still pushing Pocket recommendations, I still find that choice baffling.

uallo 6y ago
> I still find that choice baffling Why?
- DanCarvajal 6y ago
  Why would I want content recommendations from my browser, especially Firefox? It's an utterly bizarre feature to ad. It didn't make sense for Google to have done it but it especially didn't make sense for Mozilla to play the "me too" game. It's a waste of money and developer resources and frankly shows poor stewardship on the part of management.
  - uallo 6y ago
    Then disable it. Judging from comments in this post, there seem to be numerous people who like it. And given Mozilla owns Pocket and a small amount of revenue is coming from it, what is wrong with pushing it?
    - DanCarvajal 6y ago
      Because at the same time they've struggled to move past the Gecko engine and create a product that can reasonable keep up with Google Chrome. It was the wrong choice made at the worst time, wasting time and resources.
      - uallo 6y ago
        Are you saying that the people working on the engine and the ones working on Pocket are the same? Hint: Probably not.
        6y ago

kleiba 6y ago

OT: I would like to write an extension that restores the previous clicking behavior on the title and search bars but I have never written a Firefox extension before. Does anyone know if this kind of functionality change would even be possible with the current extension framework?

jraph 6y ago
I would not expect this. One of the main points of removing the old way of doing extensions was to stop allowing extensions to arbitrarily modify the browser's UI, which was difficult to maintain.

jiggawatts 6y ago

Wow, they finally got around to fixing a certificate-handling issue. That must have closed a bunch of decade-old bugzilla issues. Now if they could just get around to supporting intermediate CA certificates and all of the Windows certificate stores, not just a couple of randomly chosen ones, that would be swell. Also, IPv6 support in PAC files would be nice. If any Mozilla employees come to YC News: Unimportant-seeming stuff like this is why Chrome crushed Firefox in the Enterprise.

monus 6y ago
I have resisted using anything other than Firefox since the IE days but I have been literally forced to switch to Chrome because of this issue on my work Macs and every time I checked, I was surprised to see that’s not implemented. Finally. Thank you Mozilla!
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> Unimportant-seeming stuff like this is why Chrome crushed Firefox in the Enterprise. This isn't why. At work I deal with two different vendors who refuse to troubleshoot any issues with their products on anything but Chrome. To this day, the issue has never been a browser compatibility issue, but we have to actually temporarily give the user a Chromium-based browser just to get a modicum of decent support these days. Both vendors, of course, tell us we should just use Chrome because it's the only browser they support. (Even though other browsers work fine.) And unfortunately, most IT staffers end up getting directed by superiors to follow said instructions.
- hinkley 6y ago
  We got Firefox in the first place due to insubordination by developers, many of whom were told that we were only going to support IE. But it was easier to debug on Mozilla so it got supported first because you could eliminate 90% of the bugs before ever having to touch IE.
- acdha 6y ago
  > This isn't why. At work I deal with two different vendors who refuse to troubleshoot any issues with their products on anything but Chrome. This is the case now but a decade ago, in the period the original poster was talking about, it was because of things like what they mentioned: Mozilla needed some attention to detail on those tickets, a robust MSI install package, and a polished policy deployment system. Lots of large shops deployed it but it wasn't loved because there was always some wart to work around.

batsoupremacy 6y ago

one of the reasons why i love firefox? the Tracking protection. it makes webpages faster to load. Cool

Markoff 6y ago
ublock origin makes pages load faster I'm curious why it is still not built in instead other nonsense they integrate
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  Google would not allow Mozilla to do this
  - shultays 6y ago
    How? Do you mean they would cancel their search deal? Does Google have any power over Mozilla?
    - mxschumacher 6y ago
      If past revenue numbers are any indication [0], then Google as a lot of power of Mozilla. They are privacy focused, so I suppose they don't make money through the sale of personal data; also their services are free. Unless there is some other revenue source I'm missing, there seems to be a significant dependency on search engines and similar partners. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Nextgrid 6y ago
Firefox's Tracking Protection is a fraud and has a whitelist of domains to allow, which include Google and Facebook properties despite them being the biggest threats to privacy.

adrian17 6y ago

> Wasm Multi-value is now supported, meaning that WebAssembly functions can now return multiple values, and instruction sequences can consume and produce multiple stack values The linked description, while great, is half a year old and focuses on technical aspects of parts of the toolchain. How far are we currently from being able to enable this in normal builds of Rust or C++? EDIT: seems like I can enable this in nightly rustc by passing `-C target-feature=+multivalue`.

emerged 6y ago

Does anyone know if there's a way to stop Firefox giving me "http://weather/" http://weather/" as the first suggestion when typing 'weather' in the address bar? I have never in my life wanted to visit weather.com but I can't seem to make Firefox stop suggesting it. It doesn't do this for other keywords.

msclrhd 6y ago
If you have that in your history, you can highlight that entry in the search results (e.g. using the up/down arrow keys after typing "weather") then press Shift and Delete to delete it from the history. If you don't want search results, you can go to the options/preferences, select search, and uncheck the "Provide search suggestions" option.
- impassionedrule 6y ago
  This key combo doesn't work
  - emerged 6y ago
    It doesn't work for me either. It comes up as a solution whenever I try to solve this particular problem but it doesn't work for some reason.
  - toyg 6y ago
    try searching for the item in your History sidebar, then right-click -> Forget about this site.
    - jniedrauer 6y ago
      I've done this and the OPs suggestion, and the incorrect autocomplete persists. In my case, I went to a random person's blog that starts with the same two letters as a website I use frequently. I've given that random person's blog thousands of hits over the last year...

askjdlkasdjsd 6y ago

Hate to be cynical, but I feel like they're just releasing a new one every week just to stay in the news.

Tagbert 6y ago
They are on a 6 week release cycle. Every 6 weeks they release the changes that are ready. Sometimes the changes are large, sometimes small. Over time, rapid releases tend to get new features out sooner than delayed releases. Don’t get hung up on the version number. It doesn’t mean this is a major release, it is just the 78th release in a series.
- executesorder66 6y ago
  They changed it to a 4 week release cycle.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Netscape 1.x and NCSA Mosaic were originally on a ~6 week release cycle. This is just returning to your roots. I think we have this revisionist history where the signers to the Agile Manifesto invented these processes from whole cloth, when it's more accurate to think of it as 80% curated list of existing practices, >10% discovered, <10% invented. I ran a Kanban board in 1995, and I wouldn't learn about Deming, Goldratt or Ohno for another ten years. I think a couple people were upset or at least perplexed by my 'yeah ok' reaction to some of their revelations.
Jallal 6y ago
Last release was done on June 2, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/77.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/77.0/releasenotes/ The previous one was done on May 5, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/76.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/76.0/releasenotes/ And the one before on April 7, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/ More or less, one release per month. Hardly "every week".

caution 6y ago

New in Firefox 78: DevTools improvements, new regex engine, and abundant web platform updates https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-78/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/new-in-firefox-78/

noisy_boy 6y ago

I am a pretty ardent Firefox supporter and prefer it over Chrome but some of the issues are still jarring and really affect the user experience. E.g. this 10 year old bug which I still have to deal with multiple times every month where if you have couple of windows open with one having pinned tabs and close the other one first, the pinned tabs are not restored upon restart: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587400 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587400 Mozilla needs to shift focus, atleast briefly if not long term, to work on squashing such common issues instead of racing to add new features.

izolate 6y ago
Agreed. I'm tracking a 7 year old bug to support `<input type="month" />` that's probably an easy win, given the foundation work is completed by supporting other date input formats. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320
- clairity 6y ago
  yah, i would love it if mozilla focused on all kinds of form controls, bringing them to parity styling-wise, adding more hooks for things like validation/more complex interactions, adding common controls (like month), etc. basically, they should look at the various web ui toolkits like bootstrap and integrate all the controls and behaviors common across all of them. it would be such a major win for developers and users.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Maybe Mozilla should stop the features and branding for a little while and make a revamp sprint ?
- pjc50 6y ago
  I have a 20 year old feature request to support "if type is text/plain (maybe text/*) and firefox brings up the download box, add the option to just view it in the browser in the first place". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 (this has become less relevant in recent years as "everyone" uses github to present source to the world, and websites in general vanish in favour of social media)

jadbox 6y ago

Just tested Firefox 79.0b1 with webrender.all and surprisingly it's performing leaps over Chrome on Win10 Intel GPU. In the below image, left side is Firefox Developer Edition and right is Chrome 83.0.4103.116 on Windows 10 on a Dell XPS. https://i.redd.it/6gaj12tlh2851.png https://i.redd.it/6gaj12tlh2851.png

abmobi 6y ago

Firefox has slowly crawled back into my daily workflow of development as well as general browsing with the 67.0 release mid last year or so, that brought in major performance improvements. Though there is one caveat that bothers me a lot. When auto restoring sessions after I've closed Firefox and launch it the next day, it restores the same tabs, but with the old data (for eg., youtube or twitch live channels / searches). Every tab needs to be refreshed manually to get the new data, which Chrome automatically does.

clairity 6y ago
i prefer this behavior, as i often want to see the "old" version of pages that i had been looking at before and avoid a barrage of network requests at startup. in any case, i'm pretty sure there's an about:config setting to change it.

furbyhater 6y ago

"We've disabled old TLS connections and insecure cipher-schemes, so websites which used to work will now display an error" doesn't really sound like an improvement for the user. I'd rather see a warning detailing the situation and asking me if I want to proceed (maybe I don't care about encryption when visiting the particular site).

kbrosnan 6y ago
There has been a bypassable error for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 for several months. There have been error messages in devtools. In October of 2018 the browser vendors jointly announced that this change was coming. [1][2] This is happening in coordination with Chrome. The sites that are affected by this have had nearly 2 years to sort out their upgrade to TLS 1.2 or 1.3. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old-versions-of-tls/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old-ve... [2] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/chrome-ui-for-deprecating-legacy-tls.html https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/chrome-ui-for-deprecating-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > The sites that are affected by this have had nearly 2 years to sort out their upgrade to TLS 1.2 or 1.3. ... or are hardware appliances with a management interface, segregated on an internal VLAN, that will never be updated, but which were helpfully "forward thinking" enough to force HTTPS.
driverdan 6y ago
Unfortunately most users don't have enough knowledge to make an informed decision like that. It's better to keep users secure by disabling insecure ciphers.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Is for your own good comrade!

vehemenz 6y ago

Firefox shows the full URL, fully supports multiple Google accounts, and is the only browser that has temporary container tabs. I'm surprised Chrome users tolerate soft paywalls or having to constantly clear their cache. It's a basic feature every browser should have in 2020.

gganley 6y ago

So I'm on macOS using Safari for web browsing, chrome for work (web app + backend). I'm on the younger side so chrome has been omnipresent. I do not mean to understate the importance of privacy in the modern web, so don't misunderstand my question. Why would someone, as a developer and a user, want to use Firefox over Safari (mostly) and Chrome (for work).

tandr 6y ago
1. uBlock Origin, and some other extensions. 2. Ability to tweak css a bit, and get multi-row tabs (that was primary reason for me)
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> I do not mean to understate the importance of privacy in the modern web > Why would someone, as a developer and a user, want to use Firefox over Safari (mostly) and Chrome (for work). You wrote the answer before the question. Safari might have users' best interest at heart, but anything that stops an advertising company's browser from dominating the market is a good thing.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  You made me think of Drew's last blog entry: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/26/Vendor-purpose-OS.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/26/Vendor-purpose-OS.html Maybe we need to coin "vendor-purpose browser" as well? All of the big three are, to some extent. And now, one has to think of the motives behind each vendor. Hint: I'll stay on Firefox. And I even use other browsers sometimes, that just support some HTML (elinks, dillo...) on underpowered systems. Maybe we just need more underpowered systems?
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
As a web developer you should be using all browsers, maybe not the more obscure ones, but the big 3 for sure

atombender 6y ago

I switched from Brave to Firefox recently, and I'm very happy! I perceive it as faster, and feature-wise it's pretty much equivalent. It's made some enormous performance improvements. Firefox still has some rough issues. It doesn't always feel like a native app (e.g. form fields, toolbar, preferences), and its visual touches (e.g. the main toolbar) are sometimes heavy-handed. In other areas, such as the "omnibar" behaviour, it's still catching up to other browsers, but at least it's catching up. Another thing I dislike is just how much tweaking I had to do to remove quirks. For example, Firefox has some really excessive animations, which fortunately can be turned off ("ui.prefersReducedMotion" in "about:config"). Firefox has some ways to go, but I'm a lot more optimistic about its future than I used to be.

Munky-Necan 6y ago
I tried to use Brave for a little bit, but it felt like I was apart of a meme. The browser is fine, but it felt invasive and awkward. I can't put my finger on why it made me feel this way; something was just... off. Firefox and Safari are my two main stays now. Both have privacy focus, although one takes privacy significantly more seriously. They are both phenomenal browsers in my opinion.

defnotashton2 6y ago

I want to use Firefox but find the plug in system to be unusable and therefore prefer a chromium based solution. I have 30+extensions, many developer based, many for privacy and blocking, and many new ones to prevent sites from dictating my behavior like blocking copy and pasting of text. But the most important one is a plug in manager that allows me to to toggle on/off individual plug-ins from the sidebar with two clicks. FFs plug in page is atrocious. It's a Giant infinite scroll page that takes several clicks to do anything and I don't think ctrl f works so I have to scroll and look.. Nope. I just can't. In an age where the web is becoming more hostile to users by hiding and controlling the info, and forcing things like amqp, I think plug-ins are really the only override to enable user agency and Firefox plug in management is very immature.

findjashua 6y ago
you can set keyboard shortcuts to toggle the add-ons. Yes, you do have to go through the single page as you mentioned, but it's a one-time thing. Personally, I can't leave Firefox due to: 1. Sidebery (on Desktop) 2. Night-mode (on Mobile)
- renjimen 6y ago
  Sidebery - wow! I'd looked for a vertical tab add-on to no avail last year, but this is incredible. Thanks. It still boggles my mind that everything is made to go horizontal on default Windows/Mac UIs when desktops are widescreen and most content we consume now is tall and thin.
  - findjashua 6y ago
    Yep! Firefox supports vertical sidebars (which Chrome doesn't I guess?), so you find a lot of Firefox add-ons for vertical tree-style tab sidebars. Sidebery is my favorite by far, because it also lets you organize the tabs in "panels", and lets you set keyboard shortcuts for navigating across panels. So you don't end up with a giant list of 50 tabs. Eg I have 1 panel for email/chat/music, and a separate panel for each task I'm working on. Makes things a lot more manageable, since each panel usually has only 5-10 tabs.

interfixus 6y ago

So ... "Close tabs to the right" and "Close other tabs" moved from top level context menu to submenu "Close Multiple Tabs". This is the kind of ungraceful UI degradation which would send me packing if there was anywhere else decent to go.

mmphosis 6y ago
Wow. Right-click on a tab. I didn't even know that menu existed.

logie17 6y ago

Very nice - the PIP functionality is something I've been looking forward to with more browser support.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

My Firefox's About page says I'm running Firefox 77.0.1, and that my browser is up-to-date. Is it because I'm running OS X 10.9, and they're planning to migrate me to ESR but the ESR build isn't out yet or something? Because I'm on 10.9, and I know my system is vulnerable, I always try to update to the latest release very quickly.

Hemospectrum 6y ago
According to IRC rumors, automatic updates are delayed for a bit after the release is announced. Not sure if this is due to CDN replication or some other issue. At any rate, you can get the update faster by downloading and installing it manually.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I expected some delay as it was rolled out, but it's now five hours later and I still haven't gotten it. I think I will indeed need to do a manual download, although I'm kind of curious how long it will take at this point.

oblib 6y ago

My old Mac Mini is getting left behind here. I dread the thought of buying a newer one but everyday it's getting closer to a necessity.

lucb1e 6y ago

Anyone know what this means? > We fixed bugs in the search results quality composition and improved search result texts based on recommendations by our partners. It sounds like Firefox has its own search engine? Do they mean the browser history+bookmark search feature? Or the search query suggestions when you have third-party autocomplete turned on? What "partners" (this sounds very markety) is this about?

ryuukk_ 6y ago

nice, user share dropped again this month :)

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Firefox is great. All I want from it now is to have tabs smaller than 50px and to have CSS property backdrop-filter finally enabled to have those niiiice blurred backgrounds.

jetofff 6y ago

Does anybody here actually dislike Firefox (as a daily driver or in webdev)?

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
I don't like the constant UI changes, the ugly configuration menus, the new bar and the bundling of stuff nobody asked for like Pocket.

akulbe 6y ago

Interesting. I don't see anything about it in the Release Notes, but Help > About Firefox would normally offer the latest update. Mine is saying 77.0.1 is up to date.

jaipilot747 6y ago

On Firefox for Android Beta, the default seems to be to opt-in, to share "Marketing data" with their mobile marketing vendor, Leanplum. This caught me by surprise and can be changed in the Settings -> Data collection menu.

syspec 6y ago

Ironically it's kind of a shame, but I feel that the success of Firebug ended up hurting Firefox in the long run. Firebug was really a pioneer in the devtools, but for so long Firefox just allowed it to be the defacto Dev tools that google ended up lapping them. And they we made to play catch up Once developers started jumping, they convinced slowly got their relatives or non techs friends to switch.

kjsingh 6y ago
My mom got new Win10 laptop and I made her install Firefox only

chrisdengso 6y ago

Killing it

alibert 6y ago

FYI, the 78 update has been pulled off (0) due to a bug (1). [0] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3062694 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3062694 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1649393 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1649393