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Firefox 86.0
- forgotmypw17 6y agoWhat I'd like to see in a browser is a button which resets it to the UI from Firefox 1.0 [1] OS-provided window border and titlebar Standard menubar with keyboard hints, always displayed Five buttons: Back, forward, reload, stop, home Address bar and separate search field Status bar which shows me link URL when I hover a link [1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/mozilla-firefox-1-0-2004 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/mozilla-f... Personally, these days I use a keyboard-driven browser without any of that stuff, just the frame, vertical tabs on the right, and a status bar. But for people in my friends and family circle, I think that interface would be infinitely more functional and productive than anything else I've seen.
- stkdump 6y agoCan't imagine anyone being happier nowadays without tabs.
- simongr3dal 6y agoPresumably your application would just be creating new windows and your windowing system would take care of displaying it as either tabs or separate windows.
- wtallis 6y agoDid you ever use Firefox 1.0? It supported tabs.
- astura 6y agoFirefox has had tabs since it was in beta (and called Phoenix); It's the reason I started using it back then (~2002)
- forgotmypw17 6y agoTabs were always there since before it was even called Firefox.
- dudeinjapan 6y agoShould drop CSS support while they're at it.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoYou can turn off CSS in many browsers. It is under the Accessiblity dialog in IE, at least in 6.x. Firefox also supports disabling CSS in older versions, and so does Opera before the crippling WebKit migration. I can't imagine it being that difficult to implement as a feature. If the setting is on, you would skip interpreting any <style> tags and style= attributes. Past versions of many browsers support selecting between multiple stylesheets specified by the page, as well as provide your own stylesheet to use in place or in addition to the page's stylesheet. (This was one of the main, amazing fucking benefits of CSS, to separate presentation from content, so that users who were hindered by the page's styles could turn it off and still be able to view the content. And all of it works great if you do it right, because the styles cascade, and, I apologize for repeating myself, the content layer is separate from the presentation layer. At some point all these features went away, 'cause fuck accessibility, I guess. Meanwhile, CSS became Turing complete, so security-wise it's like having a second JavaScript which cannot be turned off. Great progress all around. /s When people ask me why I spend time on ensuring that I support older browsers in my projects, this is one of the reasons. Sometimes I just want to use a decent fucking browser that's not been lobotomized, and at least I can do it on my own sites.
- progman32 6y agoWas View -> Page Style -> No Style removed for 86?
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThe menu is no longer there, AFAIK. I have not spent much time looking for the feature, to be honest, and I no longer keep Firefox installed except when testing, so I won't look for its existence now. (I usually apt install before testing and apt remove after, because otherwise it often becomes the system default.)
- ebegnwgnen 6y agoGo to Menu -> Customize. Tick "Title Bar" Drag & Drop the "search" widget aside your URL bar Drag & Drop the Five buttons you mention where you want You're welcome. (for the status bar URL link preview on hover it's already the case by default)
- marcosdumay 6y agoAnd have it all reverted at random because well "there seems to be along time since you last used Firefox, do you want to lose all your configurations? Yes. Later."
- AshamedCaptain 6y agoEach time I see that prompt I have to pause and consider the otherwise wacky theory that there evil forces trying to cripple Mozilla from the inside. Why. Just why.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoIt's hard to try to come up with another explanation, to be honest. When I try imagine how incompetence can explain everything that's happened with Firefox in the past several years, it feels like I'm going for the gold in the mental gymnastics world championship.
- marcosdumay 6y agoI dunno. Software often have very unintuitive features, like the problem of closing with CTRL-Q on Linux, that looks like a "damn, why did they put it there on the first place", but actually is something GTK does if you follow the guidelines (what goes to show that most software doesn't follow them). My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
- jangid 6y agoI just want the disconnect button. It used to sit in status bar. I don't want to fetch things when I am reading downloaded articles.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoRemember when browsers would actually cache pages and not reload them every time you accidentally blinked or moved the mouse cursor?
- lucideer 6y agoEverything you listed except for the status bar can be gotten by customising the UI in Firefox (not single-click but pretty easy). On the other hand, if this is the kind of approach to UI you like personally, I think the Vivaldi browser would be up your alley (sadly not open-source though).
- forgotmypw17 6y agoSorry, but that is not even close to true, see my other comment describing what doesn't work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26276871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26276871 Vivaldi is OK, but it's proprietary AFAIK?
- lucideer 6y agoAha, yes sorry: re: the menubar, I am on a Mac so I didn't realise that wasn't restore-able on other systems. Re: the status bar I had mentioned that, that's unfortunately still missing. Vivaldi is proprietary sadly :'( But it does tick all of your boxes otherwise.
- xuhu 6y agoHow does Total Cookie Protection work with sites that redirect users to authentication providers on other domains ? What about shops that redirect to payment processors that rely on some magic cookie sharing in the background ? What about company.com loading some cookie-dependent content from company-cdn.com ?
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago> What about company.com loading some cookie-dependent content from company-cdn.com ? I've always tried to set up delivery of all static assets w/out cookies so that I do not incur the performance overhead. Not that it makes a huge difference except on very large sites. But last time I checked, performance & speed-test tools even remove points if this isn't done. Seems this is a feature not a bug or am I missing something?
- Ayesh 6y agoAs far as I understand, this only affects sub requests (iframes, Ajax requests, scripts, CSS, etc), and not the main request. In a redirect, the third party site is used as a friest party request, and should not be limited by this. See same site cookies and referrer policy to limit how much information is leaked to a third party with redirects.
- fctorial 6y agoFirefox is the only option for mobile webdev since it's the only mobile browser with devtools. However I won't use it as my main browser because of insanely frequent (and pointless) major ui changes. It messes with your muscle memory. This isn't beta software, is it?
- veselin 6y agoI use Firefox on Android all the time. When I occasionally open Chrome, I see the UI there changes quite often. Now it has tab groups. Maybe a month ago it changed the url bar.
- fctorial 6y ago> Now it has tab groups It's hidden behind a right click menu. So it's a muscle memory friendly change. I don't remember the url bar change to be too disorienting either.
- Zababa 6y ago>So it's a muscle memory friendly change It's not really. Now when you right click (long press) to open a link on a new tab it opens it in the same tab group as your tab. If you then use the button at the top to switch tabs (how it worked before), you are now switching tab groups. To switch tabs in your tab group, you have to do it at the bottom.
- viraptor 6y agoIn the last two years I only noticed: address bar can be on the bottom (user setting), open sites changed from tiles to a list. What other major UI changes have happened? (Or are you talking about desktop UI?)
- fctorial 6y agoOn desktop, url bar click behavior. It was changed from full selection to cursor, and then reverted.
- megous 6y agoI wonder if the web engine development pretty much stopped, or developer notes are just less detailed over the last year or so. Those are a shadow of the former self, certainly.
- jakub_g 6y agoUnder "developer" section there's a link with dev focused changelog https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/86 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel... Note also that release schedule is now 4 weeks instead of 6 weeks. Hence each release might feel "smaller".
- megous 6y agoI was writing about those dev changelogs and not just this release...
- taranissnark 6y agoThey did let go of a third of their staff about a year ago.
- megous 6y agoI know, all I wonder is whether engine development slowed down or changelog person was let go, or whatever.
- clairity 6y agoit’s particularly aggravating that form fields have been largely stagnant over the past 20 years. so much repetitive development happens around forms (validations or date/time pickers, for instance) and yet very little effort goes into improving them.
- digianarchist 6y agoMicrosoft are actually doing good in this space. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/10/15/form-controls-microsoft-edge-chromium/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/10/15/form-controls...
- blfr 6y ago> Firefox now supports simultaneously watching multiple videos in Picture-in-Picture. Is Adderall the new Aspirin? Or is there some WFH use here that I'm missing.
- astura 6y agoSports immediately comes to mind - Some people I know who are really big into sports like watching/keeping track of multiple games at once.
- csin 6y agoThis is a game changer for sports bettors. Me personally, will probably stick to one video playing in the background. It's more for ambient noise. On days when there are 4 nba games going on simutaneously, I'm far too busy fiddling with my spreadsheet/nba feed to be actually watching the game.
- wongarsu 6y agoNot only multiple games, but also multiple viewpoints of the same game. Twitch added support for that use case for esports (I think as part of their deal with Overwatch League).
- everdrive 6y agoI never understood this feature either. I can already make multiple browser windows if I want. Definitely not interested in PIP.
- matsemann 6y agoI like that I can scale the video as I want. Like on a news-site the only options are often a small inline viewer or full screen. So I use PIP often for that even though I'm staying on the page. And it's just more convenient than trying to maximize the space of another browser window and making it stay put above other stuff. No extra chrome, no wasted inline space on the page. I can just take a Blender tutorial for instance and move directly above my Blender window and it obscures as little as possible.
- 0-_-0 6y agoI wonder if Total Cookie Protection is unnecessary if I have First Party Isolation enabled already
- ihuman 6y agoIt looks like TCP includes FPI, but isolates more data sources, like the storage APIs and Workers. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/02/introducing-state-partitioning/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/02/introducing-state-partitio...
- matsemann 6y agoWow, Ctrl+P has now started to open the proper print-interface with a preview! I've helped loads of people over the years complaining about printing in Fx vs Chrome. It used to be so in Fx that selecting Print from the menu opened an interface for printing (ala Chrome), but pressing Ctrl+P just opened standard OS print dialog. So power users never saw the nice print preview.
- betamaxthetape 6y agoAs someone who always used the Ctrl-P keyboard shortcut, I never even knew that a print-with-preview interface existed in Firefox.
- dtx1 6y agoIt never even occured to me to use the menu version. What an upgrade
- eznzt 6y agoThis new release also includes new ads, seems they forgot to put that in the release notes: https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433 https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433
- Jamieee 6y agoFrom the tweet's Author it's disabled via: about:config browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites there is also: services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites
- eznzt 6y agoI use Firefox ESR just so I don't have to do this every couple months.
- SamuelAdams 6y agoYes, this works. For now. The bigger problem is that this will probably go away at some point and the "sponsored" items will have no way (or a very difficult way) of being removed. This has happened before with the browser toolbar having an about:config option to disable enlarging behavior, now you have to do some hacky CSS thing. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1274579 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1274579
- JadeNB 6y agoNow you don't just have to anticipate having options removed; that's the explicit development plan. (Quote is about a different preference, but I think it makes the style of development clear.) > We intend to add a keyboard shortcut for this[1]. In the meantime you can revert to the old printing interface by setting the `print.tab_modal.enabled` preference to `false` via the page `about:config`. In a few releases time, after we've finished integrating user feedback and polishing rough edges, we intend to remove that preference though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275683
- pmurt7 6y agoI was reading the blog posts of Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/author/mitchellmozillacom/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/author/mitchellmozillacom/ What the fuck? It's almost like a (far-left) political agenda. No words about the browser, the product vision, the future features and so. Mozilla is doomed.
- afavour 6y agoSo you're angry at the Mozilla CEO for posting about political topics rather than the browser and product vision? And yet here you are, in a thread about the Mozilla browser, posting about political topics. Maybe take your own advice?
- swebs 6y agoI don't know why you're being so hostile. It was in interesting revelation to me. And pretty surprising too since the last CEO was kicked out for far less.
- waxpoeticwhy35 6y agoWhat's bad in that blog? Any particular article?
- jamienicol 6y agoLike so often on HN when this comes up, you fail to even get the basic facts right. Such as which CEO was "kicked out". And it certainly wasn't for far less
- GolDDranks 6y agoOne more release to avif!
- gardaani 6y agoWould it make sense to skip AVIF and add JPEG XL instead or wait for WebP2? JPEG XL and WebP2 have better image features, such as progressive loading.
- zamadatix 6y agoThe machinery needed to add AVIF is small since browsers/sites/devices are already shipping AV1 more and more and will continue to do so regardless. Also AVIF does better at extremely low file sizes. JPEG XL and/or WebP2 are looking to be great but there is not reason to wait for perfect to come along before adding another format to the browsers - it's not like they are running out of room for more image decoders :).
- pentagrama 6y agoNot totally related, but someone know if exist an RSS feed to follow the stable Firefox releases? Can't find it on this page. This Firefox changelogs are awesome to know big improvements and new features on a surface level. For Chrome I didn't find a proper way to follow the releases even if it has some RSS feeds, I follow the RSS feed of Chrome Releases blog [1] with a tag filter [2] but can't exclude the several point releases, and also the changelogs are not very informative [3]. And the Chrome blog [4] I get some feature announcements but is a mix bag. [1] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com https://chromereleases.googleblog.com [2] http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Stable%20updates http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default... [3] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2021/01/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_19.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2021/01/stable-channel... [4] https://blog.google/products/chrome/ https://blog.google/products/chrome/
- nitrohorse 6y agoInterested myself, currently using https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/mozilla.announce/msgs/rss_v2_0.xml?num=50 https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/mozilla.announce/msgs/r... (https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.announce https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.announce).
- pentagrama 6y agoThank you! That's perfect! And a bit ironic that the RSS feed is on a Google product aka the company that kill Google Reader.
- folknor 6y agoTake a look at my reply to the OP
- folknor 6y agohttps://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/tags https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/tags https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/atom-tags https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/atom-tags https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/rss-tags https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/rss-tags And here's my lua script that uses notify-send to notify me of new releases: https://gist.github.com/folknor/32f703b270c6ad72bc12d98feb2f7034 https://gist.github.com/folknor/32f703b270c6ad72bc12d98feb2f... I modified it slightly before posting it here, but it's mostly useless unless you're me :-D Because when I write shell scripts (which I always do in lua), I always use my fork of luash (from my github), and I don't imagine anyone else has it. It's easy enough to rewrite the script to not require it, though. Also, the other obscure dependency it uses is lua2xml, which is notoriously unreliable, but I still use it in all my shell scripts that interact with XML.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago> For Firefox users in Canada, credit card management and auto-fill are now enabled. Apparently this has been available to users in the US since v81, and will be available to other locales in the future. Out of curiosity, how are these features gated geographically?
- alecmg 6y agoFound a random improvement: Kraken 1.1 benchmark runs faster now. Improved from roughly 760 to 700ms on my 5800X. Still ways to go to reach Chrome at 560ms
- extra88 6y agoRunning that benchmark on my Mac (Catalina), I see a comparable difference between Firefox and Chrome but Safari (14.0.3) is ~10% faster than Chrome. This wasn't with any care taken to create a controlled environment and my Firefox had plenty of tabs open.
- wpdev_63 6y agoIf anyone from the firefox mobile team is here: please fix the bug where you can't scroll through the tabs when they overflow. Also opening whatsapp links for some reason doesn't open whatsapp but chrome does. This bug and several other nuance things made me go back to chrome mobile which is unfortunate. Especially with the fact that chrome mobile doesn't support plugins. I am a happy firefox user and the print preview is one of the very few things that made me open chrome backup.
- onelovetwo 6y agoWhile we'll reporting things here, please remove the `delete` to go back, it has fucked me over so many times in text fields. No other browser does it.
- skymt 6y agoBackspace will no longer be used for navigation by default in Firefox 87: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041377 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041377 That key binding was added for interface compatibility with Internet Explorer, which is less important these days. If you'd like to disable it now, go to about:config and set browser.backspace_action = 2.
- ckcheng 6y agoOn Linux, browser.backspace_action = 2 was default since 2006-12-07: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action Apparently, you can use value 1 to use backspace to scroll a page if you like!
- perryizgr8 6y agoAFAIK, delete has never worked as a substitute for going back in the history of web browsers.
- helij 6y agoMy browser history is NCSA Mosaic->Netscape->Firefox. Even when Firefox had its downs I stuck with it. Not sure why. It just felt right. It was always perfect for me. The only thing I miss are subtitles in Picture-in-Picture mode.
- cpeterso 6y agoHere's the Firefox bug for Picture-in-Picture subtitles. Unfortunately there has not much progress. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551058 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551058
- miroz 6y agoThis. There maybe are some downsides to Firefox but it still feels better than chrome. I'm staying with it
- dotancohen 6y agoSkipped over Phoenix?
- BuckRogers 6y agoYup. I will say though, as someone that never left FF, the new Edge is really good on Windows. I'm impressed. Edge is missing some features that make browsing for me, a far more enjoyable experience though. For Firefox, "It just feels right" is the best way to put it.
- jdlyga 6y agoI always used Firefox because it was far ahead of other browsers in terms of UI, such as good tabbed browsing. But now it's gotten rather clunky compared to Chrome. It's been playing catch up for years. For example, Firefox really needs to implement Tab Groups like Chrome. It's such a great feature, and it's a shame that Firefox doesn't have a version of it.
- mippenhappen 6y ago>Tab Groups like Chrome I knew it had added that feature but I didn't actually try it until just now. And oh my god you can FOLD the group... tab management just got a lot better for me!
- buzzy_hacker 6y agoI like tree style tabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- dbg31415 6y agoFirefox is my browser of choice, but it handles streaming video / video calls very poorly on MacOS. My MBP heats up and my battery goes into free fall. When I watch Twitch or take a Zoom call in Safari the fans may come on, but it never gets anywhere near as hot. Honestly think it's dangerous to the battery life. According to Apple's Energy Usage stat, Firefox uses "57" where Safari uses "1.7" for the same Zoom call. Given how much is done on streaming video calls now, love it if Firefox made this a priority.
- partingshots 6y agoFirefox has hundreds of developers. I don’t understand why performance isn’t on par with Chrome. I try my best to use Firefox to bring support, but sometimes I just have to switch back when things get too laggy. I’m sorry, but I only have 8 hours a day, and I’m not going to let my productivity flow get ruined.
- dyingkneepad 6y agoWhat are you using that makes the performance difference be even noticeable? With the exception of cases where Firefox is absolutely broken, for me it's good enough. Or when I had crappy extensions, have you tried disabling extensions? I only have uBlock Origin and Firefox Containers these days. It does sadden me that some sites are starting to refuse to work with Firefox these days... But I won't give up.
- shaicoleman 6y agoFor me, Google Maps/Apple Maps (on DuckDuckGo) are painfully laggy on Firefox/Linux, even after force enabling all the GPU acceleration options. OpenStreetMap works fine, though. That said, Google has a long history of making their products glitchy on Firefox, so not sure it's all Firefox's fault. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
- sleepless 6y agoDo you have numbers for this claim? Looking at https://www.anandtech.com/show/16078/the-2020-browser-battle-surfing-with-speed/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16078/the-2020-browser-battle... your statement does not match the test results. In which cases are things getting laggy for you?
- Tagbert 6y agoAre you using Webrender with Firefox? It’s off by default but once I turned it on, it sped up FF significantly. No beta issues so far.
- ritonlajoie 6y agoI'm sorry Firefox, after using you for 3 years, I tried chrome again and for my usage, Chrome seems more reactive to my browsing, faster. I really tried but whenever I play some media, I have issues with my nvidia driver (using windows 10) or stuff like that. I will try again in the future for sure if you are still aroung !
- BuckRogers 6y agoThere's a lot of reasons why Firefox is still the best browser. I never did move to Chrome all these years, and Edge is incredibly impressive on Windows. I'll detail my opinion on the path forward for Mozilla and Firefox in particular. Surprisingly it's been Firefox on iOS that's the biggest pull to keep me on FF overall. I think that's the real way forward for them. There's just too many Google nags to switch to Chrome on the desktop. This is limited on mobile, and putting all resources into mobile features is paramount. Then desktop version usage increases due to sync features. I'm a Windows and iOS user, and on the desktop, zippiness is feature #1. I think they should move to Chromium, as unpopular as that is. It'll save on maintenance and an un-Googled Chromium like Edge is a very good thing. Leave FF exactly as it is, all features intact with Chromium underpinnings, borrow a few features from Vivaldi (horizontal tab support), and you easily have the best browser on the market. On iOS, it needs support for the URL bar to move to the bottom as on Android. It needs uBlock Origin integrated by default, to borrow from iOS Edge having adblock. Improving dark mode is key. I just can't get it to work properly with DuckDuckGo's homepage. Images are sometimes reversed. I've had to turn it off to get pages to display a their native black background. I'd like to see it work out of the box with Facebook's messenger feature, it tries to redirect to the app, while in Safari this can be set to open in desktop mode and just works. Otherwise, general stability improvements and performance. It used to be very unstable, but its come a long way now. It's my favorite mobile browser. Would those changes be enough? I'm not sure, but I do know iOS and Android browser support is the only possible way forward other than services like their VPN. I'm the type of user though that doesn't mind the ads in the URL bar, pretty small ask on Mozilla's part. I also leave telemetry enabled because I want my usage scenario to be in Mozilla's data. As you can guess, I'm not the typical user that thinks Blink vs Gecko is somehow a mighty crusade to save the web. Even if it were where the real battle is, Mozilla is not the entity that's properly armed to take up that fight. Apple or Microsoft would be. I have other ideas on how to move Mozilla forward and make it a very big player in the tech space. The biggest problem confronting Mozilla today is probably Mozilla. If I had to guess. Trying to convey these ideas to leadership and get a path forward set in the bureaucracy is probably pretty tough.
- pabpab 6y agofirefox 86 gets stuck on cntrl p (says preparing preview and nothing happens) worked perfectly before, again a case of 'if it works -----' the `print.tab_modal.enabled` preference to `false` fix described below helped
- quantumofalpha 6y agoLooks like they've dropped layout.css.text-decoration-skip-ink.enabled pref in this release, garrhr... Whoever's bright idea this was - i hate you!
- CTOSian 6y agonice news alas still not yet, integration of the master password with the Gnome Keyring...