17 ms·

Firefox 88.0

317 points by easton 6y ago

johnklos 6y ago
JavaScript in PDF? Have people learned nothing? This is so incredibly stupid. They're just looking for bullshit "features" to implement.
globular-toast 6y ago
I thought FTP support had been removed a long time ago for some reason! I have very fond memories of FTP but I guess its time has come. I probably haven't used it for 10 years at this point.
- 51Cards 6y ago
  I would have been happier if it had just be locked down to secure connections only. I have used FTP to quickly share files to colleagues at times and this will be broken now. I'm sure I was in a very minimal percentage but it was handy to just send someone an FTP link. Now if I don't want to have to upload it to an external service I will have to share it through my web server which brings up all kinds of MIME type issues, etc. I know, edge use case.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Try this to quickly share files with colleagues: python -m http.server [port] This will share the current directory using HTTP on port 80 by default unless you provide an alternative with [port].
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  Chrome 76 (July 2019) dropped FTP support.
- cardanome 6y ago
  I used it yesterday. I regularly use FTP at work, well preferably SFTP but it does happen. While we have a automatic deployment pipeline for our own projects, lots of our customers that host externally still use good old FTP. I don't think FTP is ever going to fully die. It is still a typical way to deploy your files when using a shared web hosting that does not offer SSH.
  - gspr 6y ago
    > I don't think FTP is ever going to fully die. It is still a typical way to deploy your files when using a shared web hosting that does not offer SSH. Surely those abominations are almost dead now though, in the age of the low-overhead VMs?
    - cardanome 6y ago
      Some parts of the tech world seem quick to forget that smaller (and sometimes bigger) non-tech companies do exist. Sometimes non professional people create and deploy websites either as hobbyists or simply because there is no budget to hire a proper tech guy. Wordpress is still a huge part of the Web and is running fine on shared hosting. And yes it can be an appropriate and cost effective choice for smaller sites even in 2021. Also adding to that, the one time I did migrate a project from shared hosting to a dockerized VM solution was when the hoster was not supporting the needed PHP version anymore. Meaning hopelessly too old to ever update.
  - lou1306 6y ago
    FTP is still pretty much alive in research as well (well, until now). I also used it in the past week. I understand it has flaws, but... I don't know, this seems yet another nail in the Old Web coffin.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      "Has flaws" is an understatement. FTP does not play well with the current way the web is set up. Any firewalling or NAT is a pain unless you have the firewall introspect the FTP commands, which is easy for plain FTP because it's plain text and unencrypted, but once you start encrypting the transport it gets more complex, and you need to add support for that in the firewall. There's also often two connection channels, one for control and one for data. Just be aware that any FTP upload capability offered is likely a serious pain for the admins on the other side. Even if they finally get it configured well enough to mostly forget about, they'll have to dive back in every time they upgrade any infrastructure along the path to it. It's much easier to just pass a TCP port though, which is what scp/sftp (the SSH variant, not the misnamed ftp/s variants some clients used to advertise as it) is much easier, and if you use rsync, includes easy recovery.
drewda 6y ago
> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. The amount of complexity that one can put into a PDF is both surprising and a tad frightening.
- pornel 6y ago
  Firefox opens PDF via pdf.js. From security perspective it's merely yet another bloated web page.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  > The amount of complexity that one can put into a PDF is both surprising and a tad frightening. off-topic, but fwiw: the pocorgtfo16.pdf[1] is a polyglot that is valid PDF, a ZIP archive, and a Bash script that runs a Python webserver which hosts Kaitai Struct’s WebIDE which, allows you to view the file’s own annotated bytes. [1] https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo16.pdf https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo16.pdf
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Can't find the video but there was a sec talk where the host would demonstrate a few horrendous ones.
  - tonyjstark 6y ago
    maybe that one? https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10832-how_to_break_pdfs https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10832-how_to_break_pdfs
- mrvenkman 6y ago
  I instantly thought to myself .. "what could possibly go wrong?"
- r00fus 6y ago
  Is this using the browser's own JS engine? Do things like NoScript allow one to turn off PDF JS? On the flip side, are there any examples of PDF JS being actually useful and not a vector for tracking/exploits?
hulitu 6y ago
> Print updates: Margin units are now localized. Print in firefox is totally broken. The change to Chromium was the last nail in the coffin for printing. The new web does not care.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  ??? I print through Firefox all the time with no issues. What exactly were you experiencing?
  - avian 6y ago
    I wouldn't say that Firefox specifically is worse at it than other browsers though, but I kind of agree with parent comment that the "new web" doesn't care about printing. On more and more pages I encounter issues like the printer only printing out the cookie warning window, or just the left navigation bar, etc. and none of the actual page content that I wanted to print. Or content goes up to the first in-line advertisement and then cuts of there with just blank pages coming out of the printer after that. Or weird pagination issues where there's text on page 1 and text on page 2, but there's a bunch of text missing in between that is otherwise visible fine on the screen. I'm talking about web pages that don't specifically have a "print" button on them. If it looks like the page is using a fancy layout I typically now just do a screenshot and print the resulting .png.
- oktoberpaard 6y ago
  > The change to Chromium was the last nail in the coffin for printing. I don’t think that Firefox uses code from Chromium for printing, does it? I believe that the print interface merely resembles that of Chromium.
DangerousPie 6y ago
I can see why they are doing it but I'll really miss FTP support. A lot of public data continuous to be distributed through FTPs and for a long time Firefox has been the easiest way to browse them.
- 51Cards 6y ago
  Agreed, I was on a public FTP site about a month ago browsing through old support files. Now I'll have to configure a client for it. Edit: this might be a small opportunity for some of the native FTP apps to jump in and handle the links. Click an FTP link in the browser and launch my FTP client with the details passed through.
  - Y_Y 6y ago
    Your native file manager probably works fine with FTP.
    - jangid 6y ago
      And if you use Emacs then Tramp covers it.
- tristan957 6y ago
  You can use cURL to access FTP sites fyi.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    and you can use chrome to access http sites, perhaps they should remove http support.
  - zouhair 6y ago
    You can also use assembler to make a video game.
    - mgv11 6y ago
vanderZwan 6y ago
> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. As far as I can tell I still can't play breakout in a PDF in Firefox though (and I think that's for the better) [0] https://rawgit.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments/master/breakout.pdf https://rawgit.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments/master/br... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rbJu10Telc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rbJu10Telc
- goda90 6y ago
  Maybe the form is doing a browser check instead of a feature check and just needs to be updated?
51Cards 6y ago
>The ‘Take a Screenshot’ feature was removed from the Page Actions menu in the url bar. Odd, this is the only place I accessed it from. Not a big deal as it's still on the context menu and also can be added as a tool bar item but I am curious the rationalization behind this change. That seemed like a great place to have it to me.
- kkaranth 6y ago
  I typically use Ctrl+Shift+S for this
  - 51Cards 6y ago
    I likely would as well if I remembered it. I have always had a problem recalling key combinations across all the applications I use which is why I rely on context menus and tool bars heavily. I've called out VSCode on this a few times as well as it is a memorization fest to work efficiently in there without proper toolbars. It's not just this but I have memory issues in general which have only gotten worse as I've aged. Easy discoverability / access in UI design is a big focus for me.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      when I discover a new key-combo I write it on a postit at the bottom of my monitor, lives there for a while until it sticks in my brain.
    - rzzzt 6y ago
      In VSCode, use Ctrl+Shift+P to bring out the command palette and type in your wish. The corresponding shortcut is also displayed.
      - 51Cards 6y ago
        Yep, but I find it to be a really poor paradigm for efficient work if you don't remember them. Having to search the command palette is much slower than being able to set up a toolbar of often used functions. Don't get me wrong, the command palette is great to have but if you can't memorize all those functions then it's a really poor replacement. For efficiency Key combo > toolbar > command palette. I just hate to be forced into #3 because #2 doesn't exist. (not to mention that the developers make crazy arguments in the forums about why they refuse to impliment it... but that's all off topic)
IncRnd 6y ago
> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. That's the first item listed under Features, yet I wouldn't classify that as a feature! That's a vulnerability waiting for an exploit.
lights0123 6y ago
> The ‘Take a Screenshot’ feature was removed from the Page Actions menu in the url bar. To take a screenshot, right-click to open the context menu. You can also add a screenshots shortcut directly to your toolbar via the Customize menu. Open the Firefox menu and select Customize… ...why. Obviously it's easy to add it to the overflow bar, but it was handy having it there. Especially on pages that block right-clicking (including for good reasons, like games).
- jorams 6y ago
  > Especially on pages that block right-clicking Note that, in Firefox, you can always get to the context menu using shift-right click.
  - Y_Y 6y ago
    Thanks! This always bugs me. Maybe not disabling right-click has legitimate uses in things like games, but I only ever seen to see it used spitefully.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      It's more 'override right click' and is useful for eg. Google Docs to use application-specific context actions. Unfortunately I agree that most sites override it just to disable it, though.
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      > I only ever seen to see it used spitefully. God I hate it when sites do that. There's a service that I pay for which disables right click, spams copyright notice modals every single time I try to copy any text and replaces the text I copied with useless copyright messages. It's so incredibly obnoxious it makes me want to scrape their content off their website out of pure spite.
- morsch 6y ago
  Here[1]'s the why: With the removal of the meatball menu in the proton work, we'd like to move the Take a Screenshot button to the toolbar to allow users to hide it or put it in the overflow menu rather than being visible all the time. ??? Edit: Also great to see how they brush over existing users who have pinned the screenshot action to the toolbar, which is something you can do with all page actions (who knew?!). We had discussed it before as a possibility, but I just confirmed with Romain that it's out of scope. For reference, ~15k users have screenshots pinned to the URL bar and engaged with it within a 1 month period. So apparently 15k people did know and now have to manually fix the regression, assuming they know how to do it. I still find it creepy that they gather data this specific, and of course users who disable "telemetry" mean nothing to them, they don't exist. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691464 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691464
curt15 6y ago
>Smooth pinch-zooming using a touchpad is now supported on Linux Glad that they're still looking after Linux users.
- mdoms 6y ago
  On the one hand yes that's great. On the other hand it's not an exaggeration to say that a decade ago would have been too late for this feature.
  - ziftface 6y ago
    I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it was only added to Mac fairly recently too, maybe around a year ago. And for a while it was behind an about:config setting as well.
- viklove 6y ago
  Unfortunately they still don't provide a PPA for their developer build, so I have to update it manually which is extremely annoying. edit: I gotta say, why the fuck would someone downvote this comment?
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    PPAs are specific to one commercial distribution. Shouldn't they offer a flatpak or something similarly cross distro?
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Manually? I downloaded their .tar.gz, have unpacked it in a location my user can write to, and rely on the built-in auto-update mechanism. Works fine.
- kelnos 6y ago
  This doesn't work for me; found something that seems to suggest it's gated behind an about:config option and only works on Wayland anyway[0]. Oh well. [0] https://www.linuxadictos.com/en/firefox-88-will-activate-the-pinch-to-zoom-function-in-linux-wayland-sessions.html https://www.linuxadictos.com/en/firefox-88-will-activate-the...
newlisper 6y ago
Have they give up on dev tools?
- momothereal 6y ago
  Why? There's been small but consistent improvements in each release, including this one.
88840-8855 6y ago
I just switched from FF to Brave. Despite the unnecessarily built-in adblocking (I prefer blocking on router level + 2nd layer via ublock) and the BAT stuff, it is a good browser. It feels so fast and snappy. I wished FF was as fast. Macbook Air M1
- iorrus 6y ago
  Yeah I moved away from FF as well after they got too political, very happy with Brave.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    That sounds like an “out of the frying pan into the fire” kind of thing.
    - babypuncher 6y ago
      Yeah, what on Earth does he even mean by "too political". I've never seen Mozilla make "political" statements beyond their user privacy rhetoric, which Brave is far more aggressive about.
      - WA9ACE 6y ago
        I'm almost certain they are referring to this blog post https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
        teddyh 6y ago
        That blog post can also be interpreted very differently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646748#26647158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646748#26647158
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6y ago
keeganjw 6y ago
Side note: I don't know how often this happens but it's kinda cool that Firefox went straight from 87.0 to 88.0 without any sub-versions. They didn't seem to have any security/bug patches, they just got it right on the first try.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I definitely noticed like "huh, it's weird we haven't had a new Firefox version to deploy yet this month". I'm used to seeing a point release nearly as soon as I deploy the previous Firefox version, lol. It isn't the first time, but it's infrequent enough to be kinda notable when they go an entire cycle without a point release.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I'm sure a few of these could have been backported but weren't severe enough to warrant an immediate push when 88 was right around the corner: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-16/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-1... And this apparently happens quite a lot [no security patches in between versions]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
- detritus 6y ago
  <cranky>Perhaps in the olden days when various releases were somewhat fundamental in nature - not sure it's quite so impressive when we've had 3 'major' releases this year already</cranky> Not that I much care - FF4Lyfe here!
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  Somewhat related is how libraries like three.js don't follow semver and only use a single incrementing version number. Reading the changelogs, it also looks like they never make any mistakes. It seems that there has never been a point in three.js's history where there's been a critical security flaw or bug severe enough to justify incrementing the version number solely for a bugfix. I have no idea how they do it. Personally I would prefer to keep things as simple as possible, but unlike the maintainers of those projects, when it comes to making releases, I'm not perfect.
fartcannon 6y ago
Mozilla, can we have bookmarks back for new tabs in Android? Collections seemingly reinvent the wheel but limit the number of bookmarks, and force me to swipe left to view them.
- morsch 6y ago
  Also can you let me go back to the New tab page without opening a new tab? You know, the same way every other page works? The way it used to work?
- matsemann 6y ago
  Agreed. Let them cover the whole screen instead of 2x4 with lots of free space below. And it would be great if selecting url bar would also allow me to choose one of my collections. Now I have to open a new empty tab first. Edit: basically what a sibling comment wrote I see
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cletus 6y ago
Still no update on super-high CPU usage of Twitch on Firefox, an issue that has been open for at least 4 years [1][2]. I really want to like Firefox and I want there to be viable alternatives to Chrome but when playing video back at 360p (not joking) grinds my 1.5 year old Macbook Pro to a halt on a popular website... I just can't use it. I don't know if this is a video codec issue, a CSS/JS issue that Twitch manages to trigger or what but it's a problem. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823 [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/917hyv/twitch_in_firefox_consumes_much_more_cpu_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/917hyv/twitch_in_f...
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Is it multi-user video chat? Firefox can't do this efficiently and it's also a problem with other tools like Jitsi.
  - cletus 6y ago
    Well, that's worse because it's a bigger issue. If you look through some of the bugs (there are several) you'll see suggestions of turning off chat to mitigate the issue but this raises even more questions: 1. Why don't users have to do that with Chrome? 2. While it does help, the video-without-chat CPU+GPU usage is still higher than Chrome's CPU+GPU usage for video-with-chat. If that also applies to Youtube or other services and has been open for 4+ years then... yeah, big problem.
- btdmaster 6y ago
  Non-solution, but have you seen https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink-twitch-gui https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink-twitch-gui? It runs natively using streamlink, and streamlink can use e.g. mpv and use minimal CPU, instead using hardware acceleration (or not run whatever JavaScript Twitch decides to run, at least).
- cpeterso 6y ago
  A good way to get traction on a Firefox performance bug is to provide a profile. You don't need to install any new software. Instructions for recording a Firefox performance profile: https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/
jacobmischka 6y ago
Does anyone know if there is an RSS feed for release notes? I couldn't find one, and the usual adding feed.xml to the URL trick didn't work in any of the instances I tried.
- dandellion 6y ago
  I suspect if they cared about RSS they wouldn't have removed support for it from the browser...
- SimeVidas 6y ago
  There’s a feed for Nightly: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/notes/feed/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/notes/feed/
  - jacobmischka 6y ago
    Exactly what I wanted, thank you!
- trog 6y ago
  I have been using the Google Group RSS view from the mozilla.announce mailing list: 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... ... which has been awesome, but I note I didn't get an item for this new version - looks like as of a couple weeks ago they have moved to a new mailing list system so this feed is gone. The new Google Group is https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/announce https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/announce but after a few minutes of guessing I haven't figured out how to get an RSS view.
conradfr 6y ago
I'm not looking forward to Firefox 89 with Proton and its redesigned tabs. edit: I'm surprised people like them: https://mk0ghacksnety2pjrgh8.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/firefox-tabs-design-refresh-proton-not-final.png https://mk0ghacksnety2pjrgh8.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
- butz 6y ago
  You might be able to revert them using userchrome.css (https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...). And as "megabar" update has shown, this new "tab" style will probably be reverted in future redesign.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    > And as "megabar" update has shown, this new "tab" style will probably be reverted in future redesign. Did they really revert the megabar? I can't find anything about that with searches. (I fixed it to look exactly like the old design with usercss, so I can't easily check myself.) As a side note, anyone using TreeStyleTab is probably immune from Mozilla's awful tab style revamp, as the tabs in TST are styled using CSS by the extension.
    - butz 6y ago
      There was this comment about removing large Urlbar: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698656#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698656#c2
      - bscphil 6y ago
        That's extremely funny, thanks. Kinda reminds me of what people have been saying about Google for a decade now - starting projects and sunsetting them with no coherent story or end goal. This case seems particularly ironic because they insisted on keeping the change despite widespread dislike.
egberts1 6y ago
Holy Moly! JavaScript in PDF?! What were they thinking? It’ll just get disabled in a few months because it makes for one awesome vector attack.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  How so? Will JS in web pages get disabled too?
  - Hjfrf 6y ago
    Hopefully
    - egberts1 6y ago
      sooner than later, desperately.
FrontAid 6y ago
Small bullet point, but an important one. This release also combats tracking with `window.name`. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26863109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26863109
childintime 6y ago
Disappointed. There is so much low hanging fruit in the GUI department: - have bookmarks/history stay on the page you open it on (and no other) - have bookmarks and history occupy a full page, instead of shoveled into a GUI element, dialog style - option to collapse tabs into a page (tab) - make the "tabs window" (the downward arrow after +) a tab, so the tabs can be sorted, searched in, or copied from, as html, to a file (I now get a rather useless list of 100 tabs) - have navigation to all of these pages, along with recent Downloads and options like Help and New Private Tab, right from the New Tab page, and leave the hamburger menu for page specific actions. And more. But even without Firefox is a great browser.
- clumsysmurf 6y ago
  And vertical tabs ... I can't install plugins on my work managed machine like Tab Trees or whatever. They also need some tab grouping thing like Chrome, which ironically they pioneered but abandoned.
- andrepd 6y ago
  Yes, I can't believe Firefox is still using a 15 years old bookmark/history dialog with atrocious UI. Completely unusable for anything but the most superficial inspection of your browsing history.
  - dandellion 6y ago
    They recently removed bookmark descriptions and the justification I read was that it was old code and hard to maintain, so maybe we're lucky and they'll improve that UI next.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    What do you dislike about it? Specifically, what about it makes it "unusable" for bookmark management, and what UI changes would constitute an improvement? I strongly prefer it to the apparent alternative, which seems to be an HTML-native interface in a tab. In fact I think doing that to preferences (about:preferences) was a step in the wrong direction. Not only is the result rather ugly (IMHO), I'm constantly losing my preferences tab among my other tabs, whereas a separate window with a native UI has a single instance (more appropriate for preferences) and doesn't get commingled with web pages.
Evidlo 6y ago
Does Firefox not import profiles from old versions? I upgraded 85->88 and got the message "this installation has a new profile" and am missing all my history, bookmarks and addons.
- MrRadar 6y ago
  It should import from the previous release, so try reverting to 85 and upgrading through the intermediate versions.
- dsego 6y ago
  Is this update why I got the 'Refresh or safe mode' dialog? I foolishly clicked and now I'm trying to restore stuff from the 'Old Firefox data' directory. This was not nice, I started thinking I was getting hacked. Esp. when it asked me for the master password five times in a row. Man is this browser rough.
- Evidlo 6y ago
  I fixed it by making my old profile the default in about:profiles It's weird that a new profile was created in the first place.
strifey 6y ago
> Firefox will not prompt for access to your microphone or camera if you’ve already granted access to the same device on the same site in the same tab within the past 50 seconds. This new grace period reduces the number of times you’re prompted to grant device access. This is a super nice little QoL improvement, but I'd love to be able to configure this to be even longer (optimally by domain, but I'd love a global setting too).
- TheGoddessInari 6y ago
  Is there a substantial gap here between this new thing, your suggestion, and "remember this choice"? Trying to imagine the use case.
  - strifey 6y ago
    True, there's not a huge difference. I just tend to prefer to reaffirm my permissions on occasion than permanently allow them. Similar to how I appreciate that most website occasionally require you to re-login.
- r930 6y ago
  According to the commit [0], you may be able to configure the period using the 'privacy.webrtc.deviceGracePeriodTimeoutMs' option in about:config [0] https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL15139da9aa2a51fa688d1aaadc7d448127be84c5 https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL1513...
dbg31415 6y ago
Still no fix for the horrible battery use on MacOS? Every streaming video call I do through Firefox turns my MBP into a toaster. According to Apple's Energy usage tool, Firefox bloats up to 70, while Safari is around 4 for the same Zoom call. Oof. I really want to love Firefox, but it destroys my battery life. Faster than 1% per minute while on a streaming video call.
bluenose69 6y ago
I have this and Safari both open to github.com on my macos box. This site has an animation showing recent github activity on a globe. It's coded in javascript, AFAIK. Firefox is using 55% of my CPU, whilst Safari is using 3%. As someone who used Firefox exclusively back in the day (and mozilla before that), I will continue to try tests like this every time a new Firefox is released. Maybe, someday, the energy contrast will be less dramatically in Safari's favour, and I'll switch back to Firefox.
- fzil 6y ago
  I did the same test on my M1 Air. Safari is using 40% CPU while Firefox is 55%. Not sure why there's such a large difference between your results and mine.
  - ziftface 6y ago
    Maybe it's running on a low power core?
  - scoopertrooper 6y ago
    Another M1 datapoint, Chrome: ~20% Safari: ~35% Firefox: ~45%
  - zapt02 6y ago
    My guess is that the OP doesn't have hardware acceleration for Firefox on his GPU configuration. You probably don't either with your numbers. I have about 3-4% CPU usage on GitHub.com using Firefox, and my GPU is at about 20% load from the 3D being drawn.
    - fzil 6y ago
      after reading your comment I checked again and realized that activity monitor has a column for %GPU as well under the CPU tab. So here's the eyeball average after watching the GitHub page for about a minute. Firefox 88 (no extensions, private mode): CPU% 55 (avg) 61 (peak) GPU% 65 (avg) 77 (peak) Safari (no extensions): CPU% 33 (avg) 40 (peak) GPU% 33 (avg) 40 (peak) <- same numbers for both CPU and GPU in safari.
jrnichols 6y ago
Icons on macOS Big Sur are still the old ones. So far, only the Mozilla products (firefox/thunderbird) haven't updated macOS icons. not sure why at this point.
- mfollert 6y ago
  The native support for macOS overall is terrible. It took them 21 years to finally support native context menus: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572 And you still have to manually configure Firefox to use the native full-screen-api so you can use the macOS menubar to chance your volume. Horrible, just horrible ... But I'm currently on Firefox Nightly and pretty happy about the recent UX/UI changes.
darekkay 6y ago
Too bad AVIF images are still not supported (only behind a feature flag). Hopefully they will be able to solve the last bugs [1] that prevent this feature from being shipped. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1443863 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1443863
atat7024 6y ago
Ctrl-F Per process site isolation No results Ctrl-Q

317 points by easton 6y ago

JavaScript in PDF? Have people learned nothing? This is so incredibly stupid. They're just looking for bullshit "features" to implement.

globular-toast 6y ago

I thought FTP support had been removed a long time ago for some reason! I have very fond memories of FTP but I guess its time has come. I probably haven't used it for 10 years at this point.

51Cards 6y ago
I would have been happier if it had just be locked down to secure connections only. I have used FTP to quickly share files to colleagues at times and this will be broken now. I'm sure I was in a very minimal percentage but it was handy to just send someone an FTP link. Now if I don't want to have to upload it to an external service I will have to share it through my web server which brings up all kinds of MIME type issues, etc. I know, edge use case.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Try this to quickly share files with colleagues: python -m http.server [port] This will share the current directory using HTTP on port 80 by default unless you provide an alternative with [port].
the_jeremy 6y ago
Chrome 76 (July 2019) dropped FTP support.
cardanome 6y ago
I used it yesterday. I regularly use FTP at work, well preferably SFTP but it does happen. While we have a automatic deployment pipeline for our own projects, lots of our customers that host externally still use good old FTP. I don't think FTP is ever going to fully die. It is still a typical way to deploy your files when using a shared web hosting that does not offer SSH.
- gspr 6y ago
  > I don't think FTP is ever going to fully die. It is still a typical way to deploy your files when using a shared web hosting that does not offer SSH. Surely those abominations are almost dead now though, in the age of the low-overhead VMs?
  - cardanome 6y ago
    Some parts of the tech world seem quick to forget that smaller (and sometimes bigger) non-tech companies do exist. Sometimes non professional people create and deploy websites either as hobbyists or simply because there is no budget to hire a proper tech guy. Wordpress is still a huge part of the Web and is running fine on shared hosting. And yes it can be an appropriate and cost effective choice for smaller sites even in 2021. Also adding to that, the one time I did migrate a project from shared hosting to a dockerized VM solution was when the hoster was not supporting the needed PHP version anymore. Meaning hopelessly too old to ever update.
- lou1306 6y ago
  FTP is still pretty much alive in research as well (well, until now). I also used it in the past week. I understand it has flaws, but... I don't know, this seems yet another nail in the Old Web coffin.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    "Has flaws" is an understatement. FTP does not play well with the current way the web is set up. Any firewalling or NAT is a pain unless you have the firewall introspect the FTP commands, which is easy for plain FTP because it's plain text and unencrypted, but once you start encrypting the transport it gets more complex, and you need to add support for that in the firewall. There's also often two connection channels, one for control and one for data. Just be aware that any FTP upload capability offered is likely a serious pain for the admins on the other side. Even if they finally get it configured well enough to mostly forget about, they'll have to dive back in every time they upgrade any infrastructure along the path to it. It's much easier to just pass a TCP port though, which is what scp/sftp (the SSH variant, not the misnamed ftp/s variants some clients used to advertise as it) is much easier, and if you use rsync, includes easy recovery.

drewda 6y ago

> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. The amount of complexity that one can put into a PDF is both surprising and a tad frightening.

pornel 6y ago
Firefox opens PDF via pdf.js. From security perspective it's merely yet another bloated web page.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
> The amount of complexity that one can put into a PDF is both surprising and a tad frightening. off-topic, but fwiw: the pocorgtfo16.pdf[1] is a polyglot that is valid PDF, a ZIP archive, and a Bash script that runs a Python webserver which hosts Kaitai Struct’s WebIDE which, allows you to view the file’s own annotated bytes. [1] https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo16.pdf https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo16.pdf
agumonkey 6y ago
Can't find the video but there was a sec talk where the host would demonstrate a few horrendous ones.
- tonyjstark 6y ago
  maybe that one? https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10832-how_to_break_pdfs https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10832-how_to_break_pdfs
mrvenkman 6y ago
I instantly thought to myself .. "what could possibly go wrong?"
r00fus 6y ago
Is this using the browser's own JS engine? Do things like NoScript allow one to turn off PDF JS? On the flip side, are there any examples of PDF JS being actually useful and not a vector for tracking/exploits?

hulitu 6y ago

> Print updates: Margin units are now localized. Print in firefox is totally broken. The change to Chromium was the last nail in the coffin for printing. The new web does not care.

ravenstine 6y ago
??? I print through Firefox all the time with no issues. What exactly were you experiencing?
- avian 6y ago
  I wouldn't say that Firefox specifically is worse at it than other browsers though, but I kind of agree with parent comment that the "new web" doesn't care about printing. On more and more pages I encounter issues like the printer only printing out the cookie warning window, or just the left navigation bar, etc. and none of the actual page content that I wanted to print. Or content goes up to the first in-line advertisement and then cuts of there with just blank pages coming out of the printer after that. Or weird pagination issues where there's text on page 1 and text on page 2, but there's a bunch of text missing in between that is otherwise visible fine on the screen. I'm talking about web pages that don't specifically have a "print" button on them. If it looks like the page is using a fancy layout I typically now just do a screenshot and print the resulting .png.
oktoberpaard 6y ago
> The change to Chromium was the last nail in the coffin for printing. I don’t think that Firefox uses code from Chromium for printing, does it? I believe that the print interface merely resembles that of Chromium.

DangerousPie 6y ago

I can see why they are doing it but I'll really miss FTP support. A lot of public data continuous to be distributed through FTPs and for a long time Firefox has been the easiest way to browse them.

51Cards 6y ago
Agreed, I was on a public FTP site about a month ago browsing through old support files. Now I'll have to configure a client for it. Edit: this might be a small opportunity for some of the native FTP apps to jump in and handle the links. Click an FTP link in the browser and launch my FTP client with the details passed through.
- Y_Y 6y ago
  Your native file manager probably works fine with FTP.
  - jangid 6y ago
    And if you use Emacs then Tramp covers it.
tristan957 6y ago
You can use cURL to access FTP sites fyi.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  and you can use chrome to access http sites, perhaps they should remove http support.
- zouhair 6y ago
  You can also use assembler to make a video game.
  - mgv11 6y ago

vanderZwan 6y ago

> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. As far as I can tell I still can't play breakout in a PDF in Firefox though (and I think that's for the better) [0] https://rawgit.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments/master/breakout.pdf https://rawgit.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments/master/br... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rbJu10Telc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rbJu10Telc

goda90 6y ago
Maybe the form is doing a browser check instead of a feature check and just needs to be updated?

51Cards 6y ago

>The ‘Take a Screenshot’ feature was removed from the Page Actions menu in the url bar. Odd, this is the only place I accessed it from. Not a big deal as it's still on the context menu and also can be added as a tool bar item but I am curious the rationalization behind this change. That seemed like a great place to have it to me.

kkaranth 6y ago
I typically use Ctrl+Shift+S for this
- 51Cards 6y ago
  I likely would as well if I remembered it. I have always had a problem recalling key combinations across all the applications I use which is why I rely on context menus and tool bars heavily. I've called out VSCode on this a few times as well as it is a memorization fest to work efficiently in there without proper toolbars. It's not just this but I have memory issues in general which have only gotten worse as I've aged. Easy discoverability / access in UI design is a big focus for me.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    when I discover a new key-combo I write it on a postit at the bottom of my monitor, lives there for a while until it sticks in my brain.
  - rzzzt 6y ago
    In VSCode, use Ctrl+Shift+P to bring out the command palette and type in your wish. The corresponding shortcut is also displayed.
    - 51Cards 6y ago
      Yep, but I find it to be a really poor paradigm for efficient work if you don't remember them. Having to search the command palette is much slower than being able to set up a toolbar of often used functions. Don't get me wrong, the command palette is great to have but if you can't memorize all those functions then it's a really poor replacement. For efficiency Key combo > toolbar > command palette. I just hate to be forced into #3 because #2 doesn't exist. (not to mention that the developers make crazy arguments in the forums about why they refuse to impliment it... but that's all off topic)

IncRnd 6y ago

> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. That's the first item listed under Features, yet I wouldn't classify that as a feature! That's a vulnerability waiting for an exploit.

lights0123 6y ago

> The ‘Take a Screenshot’ feature was removed from the Page Actions menu in the url bar. To take a screenshot, right-click to open the context menu. You can also add a screenshots shortcut directly to your toolbar via the Customize menu. Open the Firefox menu and select Customize… ...why. Obviously it's easy to add it to the overflow bar, but it was handy having it there. Especially on pages that block right-clicking (including for good reasons, like games).

jorams 6y ago
> Especially on pages that block right-clicking Note that, in Firefox, you can always get to the context menu using shift-right click.
- Y_Y 6y ago
  Thanks! This always bugs me. Maybe not disabling right-click has legitimate uses in things like games, but I only ever seen to see it used spitefully.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    It's more 'override right click' and is useful for eg. Google Docs to use application-specific context actions. Unfortunately I agree that most sites override it just to disable it, though.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    > I only ever seen to see it used spitefully. God I hate it when sites do that. There's a service that I pay for which disables right click, spams copyright notice modals every single time I try to copy any text and replaces the text I copied with useless copyright messages. It's so incredibly obnoxious it makes me want to scrape their content off their website out of pure spite.
morsch 6y ago
Here[1]'s the why: With the removal of the meatball menu in the proton work, we'd like to move the Take a Screenshot button to the toolbar to allow users to hide it or put it in the overflow menu rather than being visible all the time. ??? Edit: Also great to see how they brush over existing users who have pinned the screenshot action to the toolbar, which is something you can do with all page actions (who knew?!). We had discussed it before as a possibility, but I just confirmed with Romain that it's out of scope. For reference, ~15k users have screenshots pinned to the URL bar and engaged with it within a 1 month period. So apparently 15k people did know and now have to manually fix the regression, assuming they know how to do it. I still find it creepy that they gather data this specific, and of course users who disable "telemetry" mean nothing to them, they don't exist. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691464 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691464

curt15 6y ago

>Smooth pinch-zooming using a touchpad is now supported on Linux Glad that they're still looking after Linux users.

mdoms 6y ago
On the one hand yes that's great. On the other hand it's not an exaggeration to say that a decade ago would have been too late for this feature.
- ziftface 6y ago
  I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it was only added to Mac fairly recently too, maybe around a year ago. And for a while it was behind an about:config setting as well.
viklove 6y ago
Unfortunately they still don't provide a PPA for their developer build, so I have to update it manually which is extremely annoying. edit: I gotta say, why the fuck would someone downvote this comment?
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  PPAs are specific to one commercial distribution. Shouldn't they offer a flatpak or something similarly cross distro?
- kelnos 6y ago
  Manually? I downloaded their .tar.gz, have unpacked it in a location my user can write to, and rely on the built-in auto-update mechanism. Works fine.
kelnos 6y ago
This doesn't work for me; found something that seems to suggest it's gated behind an about:config option and only works on Wayland anyway[0]. Oh well. [0] https://www.linuxadictos.com/en/firefox-88-will-activate-the-pinch-to-zoom-function-in-linux-wayland-sessions.html https://www.linuxadictos.com/en/firefox-88-will-activate-the...

newlisper 6y ago

Have they give up on dev tools?

momothereal 6y ago
Why? There's been small but consistent improvements in each release, including this one.

88840-8855 6y ago

I just switched from FF to Brave. Despite the unnecessarily built-in adblocking (I prefer blocking on router level + 2nd layer via ublock) and the BAT stuff, it is a good browser. It feels so fast and snappy. I wished FF was as fast. Macbook Air M1

iorrus 6y ago
Yeah I moved away from FF as well after they got too political, very happy with Brave.
- teddyh 6y ago
  That sounds like an “out of the frying pan into the fire” kind of thing.
  - babypuncher 6y ago
    Yeah, what on Earth does he even mean by "too political". I've never seen Mozilla make "political" statements beyond their user privacy rhetoric, which Brave is far more aggressive about.
    - WA9ACE 6y ago
      I'm almost certain they are referring to this blog post https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
      - teddyh 6y ago
        That blog post can also be interpreted very differently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646748#26647158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646748#26647158
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 6y ago

keeganjw 6y ago

Side note: I don't know how often this happens but it's kinda cool that Firefox went straight from 87.0 to 88.0 without any sub-versions. They didn't seem to have any security/bug patches, they just got it right on the first try.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I definitely noticed like "huh, it's weird we haven't had a new Firefox version to deploy yet this month". I'm used to seeing a point release nearly as soon as I deploy the previous Firefox version, lol. It isn't the first time, but it's infrequent enough to be kinda notable when they go an entire cycle without a point release.
judge2020 6y ago
I'm sure a few of these could have been backported but weren't severe enough to warrant an immediate push when 88 was right around the corner: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-16/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-1... And this apparently happens quite a lot [no security patches in between versions]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
detritus 6y ago
<cranky>Perhaps in the olden days when various releases were somewhat fundamental in nature - not sure it's quite so impressive when we've had 3 'major' releases this year already</cranky> Not that I much care - FF4Lyfe here!
nonbirithm 6y ago
Somewhat related is how libraries like three.js don't follow semver and only use a single incrementing version number. Reading the changelogs, it also looks like they never make any mistakes. It seems that there has never been a point in three.js's history where there's been a critical security flaw or bug severe enough to justify incrementing the version number solely for a bugfix. I have no idea how they do it. Personally I would prefer to keep things as simple as possible, but unlike the maintainers of those projects, when it comes to making releases, I'm not perfect.

fartcannon 6y ago

Mozilla, can we have bookmarks back for new tabs in Android? Collections seemingly reinvent the wheel but limit the number of bookmarks, and force me to swipe left to view them.

morsch 6y ago
Also can you let me go back to the New tab page without opening a new tab? You know, the same way every other page works? The way it used to work?
matsemann 6y ago
Agreed. Let them cover the whole screen instead of 2x4 with lots of free space below. And it would be great if selecting url bar would also allow me to choose one of my collections. Now I have to open a new empty tab first. Edit: basically what a sibling comment wrote I see

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cletus 6y ago

Still no update on super-high CPU usage of Twitch on Firefox, an issue that has been open for at least 4 years [1][2]. I really want to like Firefox and I want there to be viable alternatives to Chrome but when playing video back at 360p (not joking) grinds my 1.5 year old Macbook Pro to a halt on a popular website... I just can't use it. I don't know if this is a video codec issue, a CSS/JS issue that Twitch manages to trigger or what but it's a problem. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823 [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/917hyv/twitch_in_firefox_consumes_much_more_cpu_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/917hyv/twitch_in_f...

akvadrako 6y ago
Is it multi-user video chat? Firefox can't do this efficiently and it's also a problem with other tools like Jitsi.
- cletus 6y ago
  Well, that's worse because it's a bigger issue. If you look through some of the bugs (there are several) you'll see suggestions of turning off chat to mitigate the issue but this raises even more questions: 1. Why don't users have to do that with Chrome? 2. While it does help, the video-without-chat CPU+GPU usage is still higher than Chrome's CPU+GPU usage for video-with-chat. If that also applies to Youtube or other services and has been open for 4+ years then... yeah, big problem.
btdmaster 6y ago
Non-solution, but have you seen https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink-twitch-gui https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink-twitch-gui? It runs natively using streamlink, and streamlink can use e.g. mpv and use minimal CPU, instead using hardware acceleration (or not run whatever JavaScript Twitch decides to run, at least).
cpeterso 6y ago
A good way to get traction on a Firefox performance bug is to provide a profile. You don't need to install any new software. Instructions for recording a Firefox performance profile: https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/

jacobmischka 6y ago

Does anyone know if there is an RSS feed for release notes? I couldn't find one, and the usual adding feed.xml to the URL trick didn't work in any of the instances I tried.

dandellion 6y ago
I suspect if they cared about RSS they wouldn't have removed support for it from the browser...
SimeVidas 6y ago
There’s a feed for Nightly: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/notes/feed/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/notes/feed/
- jacobmischka 6y ago
  Exactly what I wanted, thank you!
trog 6y ago
I have been using the Google Group RSS view from the mozilla.announce mailing list: 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... ... which has been awesome, but I note I didn't get an item for this new version - looks like as of a couple weeks ago they have moved to a new mailing list system so this feed is gone. The new Google Group is https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/announce https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/announce but after a few minutes of guessing I haven't figured out how to get an RSS view.

conradfr 6y ago

I'm not looking forward to Firefox 89 with Proton and its redesigned tabs. edit: I'm surprised people like them: https://mk0ghacksnety2pjrgh8.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/firefox-tabs-design-refresh-proton-not-final.png https://mk0ghacksnety2pjrgh8.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...

butz 6y ago
You might be able to revert them using userchrome.css (https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...). And as "megabar" update has shown, this new "tab" style will probably be reverted in future redesign.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > And as "megabar" update has shown, this new "tab" style will probably be reverted in future redesign. Did they really revert the megabar? I can't find anything about that with searches. (I fixed it to look exactly like the old design with usercss, so I can't easily check myself.) As a side note, anyone using TreeStyleTab is probably immune from Mozilla's awful tab style revamp, as the tabs in TST are styled using CSS by the extension.
  - butz 6y ago
    There was this comment about removing large Urlbar: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698656#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698656#c2
    - bscphil 6y ago
      That's extremely funny, thanks. Kinda reminds me of what people have been saying about Google for a decade now - starting projects and sunsetting them with no coherent story or end goal. This case seems particularly ironic because they insisted on keeping the change despite widespread dislike.

egberts1 6y ago

Holy Moly! JavaScript in PDF?! What were they thinking? It’ll just get disabled in a few months because it makes for one awesome vector attack.

StavrosK 6y ago
How so? Will JS in web pages get disabled too?
- Hjfrf 6y ago
  Hopefully
  - egberts1 6y ago
    sooner than later, desperately.

FrontAid 6y ago

Small bullet point, but an important one. This release also combats tracking with `window.name`. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26863109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26863109

childintime 6y ago

Disappointed. There is so much low hanging fruit in the GUI department: - have bookmarks/history stay on the page you open it on (and no other) - have bookmarks and history occupy a full page, instead of shoveled into a GUI element, dialog style - option to collapse tabs into a page (tab) - make the "tabs window" (the downward arrow after +) a tab, so the tabs can be sorted, searched in, or copied from, as html, to a file (I now get a rather useless list of 100 tabs) - have navigation to all of these pages, along with recent Downloads and options like Help and New Private Tab, right from the New Tab page, and leave the hamburger menu for page specific actions. And more. But even without Firefox is a great browser.

clumsysmurf 6y ago
And vertical tabs ... I can't install plugins on my work managed machine like Tab Trees or whatever. They also need some tab grouping thing like Chrome, which ironically they pioneered but abandoned.
andrepd 6y ago
Yes, I can't believe Firefox is still using a 15 years old bookmark/history dialog with atrocious UI. Completely unusable for anything but the most superficial inspection of your browsing history.
- dandellion 6y ago
  They recently removed bookmark descriptions and the justification I read was that it was old code and hard to maintain, so maybe we're lucky and they'll improve that UI next.
- bscphil 6y ago
  What do you dislike about it? Specifically, what about it makes it "unusable" for bookmark management, and what UI changes would constitute an improvement? I strongly prefer it to the apparent alternative, which seems to be an HTML-native interface in a tab. In fact I think doing that to preferences (about:preferences) was a step in the wrong direction. Not only is the result rather ugly (IMHO), I'm constantly losing my preferences tab among my other tabs, whereas a separate window with a native UI has a single instance (more appropriate for preferences) and doesn't get commingled with web pages.

Evidlo 6y ago

Does Firefox not import profiles from old versions? I upgraded 85->88 and got the message "this installation has a new profile" and am missing all my history, bookmarks and addons.

MrRadar 6y ago
It should import from the previous release, so try reverting to 85 and upgrading through the intermediate versions.
dsego 6y ago
Is this update why I got the 'Refresh or safe mode' dialog? I foolishly clicked and now I'm trying to restore stuff from the 'Old Firefox data' directory. This was not nice, I started thinking I was getting hacked. Esp. when it asked me for the master password five times in a row. Man is this browser rough.
Evidlo 6y ago
I fixed it by making my old profile the default in about:profiles It's weird that a new profile was created in the first place.

strifey 6y ago

> Firefox will not prompt for access to your microphone or camera if you’ve already granted access to the same device on the same site in the same tab within the past 50 seconds. This new grace period reduces the number of times you’re prompted to grant device access. This is a super nice little QoL improvement, but I'd love to be able to configure this to be even longer (optimally by domain, but I'd love a global setting too).

TheGoddessInari 6y ago
Is there a substantial gap here between this new thing, your suggestion, and "remember this choice"? Trying to imagine the use case.
- strifey 6y ago
  True, there's not a huge difference. I just tend to prefer to reaffirm my permissions on occasion than permanently allow them. Similar to how I appreciate that most website occasionally require you to re-login.
r930 6y ago
According to the commit [0], you may be able to configure the period using the 'privacy.webrtc.deviceGracePeriodTimeoutMs' option in about:config [0] https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL15139da9aa2a51fa688d1aaadc7d448127be84c5 https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL1513...

dbg31415 6y ago

Still no fix for the horrible battery use on MacOS? Every streaming video call I do through Firefox turns my MBP into a toaster. According to Apple's Energy usage tool, Firefox bloats up to 70, while Safari is around 4 for the same Zoom call. Oof. I really want to love Firefox, but it destroys my battery life. Faster than 1% per minute while on a streaming video call.

bluenose69 6y ago

I have this and Safari both open to github.com on my macos box. This site has an animation showing recent github activity on a globe. It's coded in javascript, AFAIK. Firefox is using 55% of my CPU, whilst Safari is using 3%. As someone who used Firefox exclusively back in the day (and mozilla before that), I will continue to try tests like this every time a new Firefox is released. Maybe, someday, the energy contrast will be less dramatically in Safari's favour, and I'll switch back to Firefox.

fzil 6y ago
I did the same test on my M1 Air. Safari is using 40% CPU while Firefox is 55%. Not sure why there's such a large difference between your results and mine.
- ziftface 6y ago
  Maybe it's running on a low power core?
- scoopertrooper 6y ago
  Another M1 datapoint, Chrome: ~20% Safari: ~35% Firefox: ~45%
- zapt02 6y ago
  My guess is that the OP doesn't have hardware acceleration for Firefox on his GPU configuration. You probably don't either with your numbers. I have about 3-4% CPU usage on GitHub.com using Firefox, and my GPU is at about 20% load from the 3D being drawn.
  - fzil 6y ago
    after reading your comment I checked again and realized that activity monitor has a column for %GPU as well under the CPU tab. So here's the eyeball average after watching the GitHub page for about a minute. Firefox 88 (no extensions, private mode): CPU% 55 (avg) 61 (peak) GPU% 65 (avg) 77 (peak) Safari (no extensions): CPU% 33 (avg) 40 (peak) GPU% 33 (avg) 40 (peak) <- same numbers for both CPU and GPU in safari.

jrnichols 6y ago

Icons on macOS Big Sur are still the old ones. So far, only the Mozilla products (firefox/thunderbird) haven't updated macOS icons. not sure why at this point.

mfollert 6y ago
The native support for macOS overall is terrible. It took them 21 years to finally support native context menus: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572 And you still have to manually configure Firefox to use the native full-screen-api so you can use the macOS menubar to chance your volume. Horrible, just horrible ... But I'm currently on Firefox Nightly and pretty happy about the recent UX/UI changes.

darekkay 6y ago

Too bad AVIF images are still not supported (only behind a feature flag). Hopefully they will be able to solve the last bugs [1] that prevent this feature from being shipped. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1443863 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1443863

atat7024 6y ago

Ctrl-F Per process site isolation No results Ctrl-Q