27 ms·

Firefox 90

462 points by TangerineDream 5y ago

etc-hosts 5y ago
the version of firefox previous to Firefox 90.0.1 (90.0.0) worked with Google Meet and my company's firefox profile. I was very excited about not needing to use Chrome anymore. I'm using Firefox 90.0.1 now... I get no sound or video in Google Meet. I had the same problem with recent versions of firefox. I have to use Chrome now for google meet.
ducktective 5y ago
> FTP support has been removed sigh
- jszymborski 5y ago
  It's my initial reaction too, but if I stop to think of Firefox as a huge, difficult-to-manage project where each feature costs dev resources and increases security risk, FTP support is probably the feature I wouldn't mind removed right next to the Pocket integration.
  - handrous 5y ago
    On the one hand I'm OK with removing features to keep the browser slim. OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep. [EDIT] I'd actually be a lot happier with this if FF were more aggressively adding new Internet or alternative-Web protocols, or trying to use their platform to give things like federated social networks more visibility and better prominence (via, say, optional but tastefully promoted integration with the browser). That might also, you know, differentiate them and give me a reason to recommend it to non-nerds again, despite "it's way, way faster than anything else, and lighter on resources, and blocks pop-ups and has tabs and doesn't have an ad banner!" no longer being enough (or even true, for some of those qualities) like it was in the early days.
    - signal11 5y ago
      > OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep. I’m sure someone will correct me, but without looking at the source code, I suspect the following will have played a role in increasing code size since the earliest days of Phoenix: * support for newer media formats, from MP4 through AVIF * DRM maybe? * WebGL * SVG? * The complexity of modern CSS
      - handrous 5y ago
        Much, much bigger JS engine/sandbox, probably. Backwards compat with an ever-growing set of HTML, CSS, and JS. I'd guess a modern CSS engine is several times (dozens of times?) larger than what Phoenix shipped with. I expect their internal UI-drawing code/framework is a lot larger than in the Phoenix days. Webassembly. Canvas. And yeah, several of the other things you mentioned—video used to be the responsibility of plugins, for example. [EDIT] in fact, some things browsers do now were seen as terrible ideas when Phoenix was released, because they would kill performance, since they're so much more expensive than alternatives. Vector graphics were regarded as to-be-avoided for a long time, because they're so much more taxing on the client than raster. CSS doing animations would have been considered insane, fit only for "look how I can bring your machine to a crawl with a web page" demos. Maintaining an entire "shadow DOM" of Javascript objects would have been regarded as parody-levels of resource wasting for all but very niche use-cases. No wonder the modern web is so slow and resource-hungry....
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        Or Wasm, or WebRTC, or indexedDB ... plus anything else on that long list: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
    - spiritplumber 5y ago
      Firefox supporting Gemini would be awesome.
  - sambe 5y ago
    I don't think my estimate of the cost of FTP maintenance would be as high as yours. Why do you think FTP would still be such a cost at this stage?
    - asoneth 5y ago
      I'm curious what your estimate would be. Mine would be somewhere between 0.5FTE assuming the bare minimum of keep-the-lights-on QA testing for each release and ongoing bug triage up to maybe 3FTE if it requires periodic security and design updates to keep up with changing standards/platforms/protocols.
  - coffeeling 5y ago
    The Pocket integration should be about the last thing removed: Independent revenue streams are something Firefox desperately needs.
- btgeekboy 5y ago
  It’s a terrible protocol not built for the modern internet. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a URL containing “ftp” that isn’t prefixed by http:// http://
  - ducktective 5y ago
    Lots of university file dumps are served on FTP...
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      I used to add '+"index of"' when searching for files or dumps using google. It still works, but definitely not as good as a few years ago. A past time: typing '+"index of" main.dfm' to see what people were developing using delphi. '+"index of" dire straits sultans of swing mp3' still kind of works.
      - jmrm 5y ago
        I have tested and still works even with actual and a bit obscure software
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      and a lot more, it's a bit sad to lose ftp
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        Why not use an ftp client if you want to use ftp?
        acwan93 5y ago
        Don't know why this comment is being downvoted. I'd prefer to use another client like Transmit or Cyberduck. Having it all in one browser introduces complexity I don't think the team at Mozilla wants.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  I'm actually ok with this. I'm happy to have it open those links in my dedicated tool just like it does with bittorrent links, etc.
- gbrown_ 5y ago
  It was a convenience but one I can live without. Purely from a LOC view ripping out features from browsers is something I welcome.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Should become extensions then. That’s why they were invented, no?
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Did you use it?
  - ducktective 5y ago
    Obviously not as much as HTTP(s) but still there are FTP links which show up after a google search from time to time...I guess now I have to context switch to the file explorer...Thunar is OK but does Windows Explorer even support FTP?
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      There are more mailto: links on the web than ftp: ones, and yet most browsers don't natively do email. Firefox didnt remove the protocol from existence. They just removed a feature nobody uses, which is better handled outside the browser.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        I thought mailto links would open in webmail if configured?
        scrollaway 5y ago
        You're getting my point. ftp links will open in an ftp client if configured.
      - account42 5y ago
        FTP and HTTP are both about transfering files, SMTP is a very different use case.
        scrollaway 5y ago
        Use your imagination. And this list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_network_protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_network_protocols
    - 5y ago
- theden 5y ago
  Have they mentioned the reason of its removal somewhere?
  - hannob 5y ago
    It's insecure by default, the TLS-enabled version has never been widely adopted, never been supported by browsers and has some horrible security problems of its own (see alpaca attack). Removing FTP thus fits into the strategy of browser to prefer HTTPS.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  IMO browser should focus on HTTP/HTML support. There are plenty of protocols and there are plenty of programs with proper support for those protocols. I don't see nothing wrong with using transmission for torrents, WinSCP for FTP, etc.
  - WillDaSilva 5y ago
    I can see where you're coming from - having a browser support all these protocols seems like poor design. Let everything do what they're good at, and all that. But usability suffers when users need to install and open different applications for every protocol they want to use. I think it might be good if there was some robust way to provide low-level browser extensions (that would probably be loaded in as shared objects). That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP, bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the browser by installing the extensions through your package manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites, but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client. In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for people to hand over low-level control of their browser would be problematic.
  - no_wizard 5y ago
    Turns out though, they're coming up with a way to support basically any TCP based protocol via WebTransport: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md
- Vixel 5y ago
  Ahh FTP. The original “cloud storage”.
- _peeley 5y ago
  Honestly, I'm more than happy to see older/niche protocols removed from web browsers. God knows the average browser contains way, way too much stuff anyway[0], not to mention there are FTP clients that are likely far better for that use case than Firefox would ever be. I wouldn't mind if FF (or other browsers) tightened their scope a little more often and adhered to the Unix philosophy a little more closely. 0: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
- coldpie 5y ago
  I've just switched to using my file manager for FTP. Works fine.
tapoxi 5y ago
I think Firefox has ~5% of our user base. It's hard to justify running separate tests for it anymore. I wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork because I don't see them crawling back to a meaningful marketshare at this rate. (Yeah I know multiple implementations and all that, but we don't have many people running FreeBSD just to give Linux some competition.)
- everdrive 5y ago
  > wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork because These already exist, and Chromium is far from perfect. I'm glad there's a viable competitor.
  - tehbeard 5y ago
    I'm not sure I'd classify it as viable with how Mozilla middle management has acted the last few years.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      It's at least technically viable for now
  - handrous 5y ago
    Safari and, especially, its iOS monopoly (for the engine, at least) are the only thing keeping Google from dominating and nearly everyone from only testing against Chrome, now that MS switched to using Chrome's engine and IE is finally nearing the end even in the important niches where it had been hanging on. FF doesn't have enough "normies" using it, isn't the default anywhere, and its trend-line is heading the wrong direction.
  - buu700 5y ago
    In my experience, Firefox actually has better performance than Chrome nowadays — particularly on Apple Silicon, where the difference is stark and dramatic. And with the new "Proton" interface, IMO Firefox finally looks at least as nice as Chrome out of the box. Firefox mobile still has some catching up to do on the overall UI/UX, but it's not too far off, and the fact that it allows extensions is nice.
metalliqaz 5y ago
Honestly I'm still not used to the new tab style that was introduced last time. 90 seems fine, but not much to get excited about from the user perspective.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  I just made mine look like the old black tab bar again with userChrome.css.
  - aendruk 5y ago
    An example for the curious: https://gist.github.com/7accb09dbddd494f53dc889877c1f524 https://gist.github.com/7accb09dbddd494f53dc889877c1f524
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    I ended up just turning the tab bar off and using the Tree Tabs extension
- wnevets 5y ago
  does anyone know of an about:config to the switch tab style back? Its still hard for me to notice which style is actually selected with Dark Mode
  - Cu3PO42 5y ago
    You need to set browser.proton.enabled to false. There's a number of browser.proton.*.enabled settings for various parts of the UI as well.
    - tsjq 5y ago
      thanks. that's helpful.
- Proven 5y ago
  The new style is bullshit. I've switched to ESR which still uses old tabs and I'll completely get rid of it once it gets updated to the new tab style.
cassianoleal 5y ago
> Now, SmartBlock 2.0 in Firefox 90 eliminates this login problem. Initially, Facebook scripts are all blocked, just as before, ensuring your privacy is preserved. But when you click on the “Continue with Facebook” button to sign in, SmartBlock reacts by quickly unblocking the Facebook login script just in time for the sign-in to proceed smoothly. I wonder how it does that, and if it's open to exploitation by a malicious website like Facebook.
- simlevesque 5y ago
  Maybe on mouse over or something like that.
  - wnevets 5y ago
    Could be related to the isTrusted[1] property to signify the event is caused by an user's action. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTrusted https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTru...
- wisniewskit 5y ago
  Basically, if a site uses the Facebook SDK to start the authenticaion flow, it will be broken because it's blocked. SmartBlock just stands in for that blocked script, acting just enough like the real API to prevent some common site breakage. This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real one, and continue the login flow. It only unblocks some Facebook resources, as listed here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensions/webcompat/data/shims.js#198 https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensi... It only unblocks it for that specific website (the domain in the tab URL), and only until Firefox is closed. Other trackers continue to be blocked, and other tracking protections stay in place (as opposed to turning off ETP for the site entirely).
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    > This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real one, and continue the login flow. I guess how it detects the "when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow" is the attack vector. If it's Javascript, it's likely to be easily exploitable. If it's in the browser's chrome I suppose it would take a malicious add-on or similar device.
zerop 5y ago
Any article/guide on how big open source projects like firefox, Linux kernel are released? I believe developers around world contribute to code. What's testing, release process like? How to they manage it?
- bugmen0t 5y ago
  Hi. Firefox developer speaking here. Feel free to take a look at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Process https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Process and https://aosabook.org/en/ffreleng.html https://aosabook.org/en/ffreleng.html. The latter is quite outdated but some core assumptions are still valid. Our CI is hosted at https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=autoland https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=autoland . Every patch that is uploaded will be tested before and after it goes into a branch. Firefox Nightly ships directly from that branch. The changes will be "promoted" to Beta (and subsequently Release) every four weeks. Our community hangs out on Matrix and is very Open to newcomer questions and other contributors. In fact, we Vene have an introduction channel and list good first bugs on bugzilla (searchable through something called "Codetribute")
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dopu 5y ago
Excited that there's more progress being done in implementing proper site isolation. Would be great to not feel like I'm losing something in sticking with FF over Chromium-based browsers.
- fsflover 5y ago
  If you need real security through isolation, try Qubes OS.
  - heresie-dabord 5y ago
    For isolation within a Linux instance: firejail, firetools apt-cache search firejail
- sambe 5y ago
  Does Chrome have better site isolation?
  - dopu 5y ago
    This article (https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...) by madaidan goes into quite a bit of detail regarding the security of the two browsers. Things are improving on FF, though.
  - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
    Yes. But I believe FF is slowly catching up in this update. There was a post about it here a while ago
wmanley 5y ago
> * Most users without hardware accelerated WebRender will now be using software WebRender. > * Improved software WebRender performance This sounds interesting. Does anyone know where I could read more about this?
- muizelaar 5y ago
  We plan on writing up some more on Software WebRender some time, but some of the particular changes included in 90 are: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1674396 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1674396 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1700434 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1700434
starik36 5y ago
class foo { #privateClassMethod() {} #privateClassField; } Finally.
- jamespwilliams 5y ago
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Classes/Private_class_fields https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... for more details for anyone else curious
johnchristopher 5y ago
> The "Open Image in New Tab" context menu item now opens images and media in a background tab by default. Learn more Ahaaaa ! Yes ! I could have sworn it had been the default behavior and it got changed at some point but I never bothered to track that down. Can anyone confirm ?
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  So based on the Learn more link it basically now follows what links do. It'll have been better if images and links had a different option. (And it'll have been much better if View image hadn't been removed.)
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  The default was the same tab until Firefox 88. They changed it to a new tab to match Chrome. And removed the same tab option because they couldn't imagine why anyone would want it.[1] [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c3 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c3
  - Avery3R 5y ago
    If you middle clicked the view in same tab button it would open the link in a background tab instead of the same one.
    - est31 5y ago
      Yeah I did that all the time and the recent change was a regression to me. Now with Firefox 90 I can finally comfortably open things in a background tab again.
  - Anthony-G 5y ago
    Thanks for the Bugzilla link. It’s making me think that I should log in to my Bugzilla account more often and look out for issues/requests such as this one. It’s not uncommon for image-hosting sites to use width and height attributes or max-height/max-width styles to get browsers to display high resolution images at a smaller size than the native image (I can often tell by how long it takes for the images to load in the browser). I liked being able to right-click on a image and click the “View image” option from the context menu to open the image in the same tab – at its native resolution. On the much rarer occasion, where there were multiple images on the same page, it was useful to be able to middle-click to open the image in a new background tab. I was annoyed that they removed this ability in Firefox 88 but now I’m doubly disappointed to discover that the reason was to be more like Chrome. It seems kind of pointless to break decades old functionality just so that there’s even less to differentiate Firefox from competing browsers. I understand that it’s good to maintain consistent UI but just because other mainstream browsers change decades-old behaviour in a particular way doesn’t mean that all browsers should do so. Having said that, Mike Hoye provides a reasoned rationale¹ for many of the recent Firefox UI changes that have annoyed and frustrated long-time Firefox users. At least now, with Firefox 90, they’ve changed the new image tab from being a foreground tab to a background tab: this should be less annoying. On a related note, I’ve now had enough time to get used to automatically selecting ‘L’ (instead of ‘A’) when I want to copy a URL into the clipboard (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324). I can live with – and adapt to – such changes if the original functionality isn’t completely removed. Also, I ensure that telemetry is switched on so developers are aware that that users make use of such functionality. Though, in this case, they can’t tell the difference between users right-clicking and choosing “View image” because they explicitly wanted the image in the same tab or because it was the default behaviour. Unfortunately, the UX experts seem to have simply divined that the users who were selecting the “View image” option didn’t really want the pre-existing, long-standing behaviour (open in the same tab. 1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c77 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c77
NelsonMinar 5y ago
Background updates! Hooray! That may sound like a basic table stakes feature but honestly it's a huge improvement. And a lot of other apps do a terrible job of it, particularly on Windows. It's remarkable how many apps require 8, 10 mouse clicks and a restart to install a minor update. Firefox didn't require any clicks but the nag / need to restart was a nuisance. Actually now that I type that I wonder what has changed. I guess the upgrade appears to happen faster because it was done before the restart? I assume Firefox itself still has to be restarted for the update to be effective. (No problem on a Windows system; the OS reboots itself so often Firefox is guaranteed to before too long :-P)
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  The key here is "while Firefox is not running." They have a maintenance service now that can check for updates when the browser is closed. Personally, I wish they hadn't done that. First, because my browser is always open. But also because I don't need another service.
  - dblohm7 5y ago
    That's not how it works, actually. The checks are done by a scheduled task.
    - metalliqaz 5y ago
      Are you sure? The OP links to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-maintenance-service https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-maintenanc...
      - dblohm7 5y ago
        The maintenance service is used to avoid UAC prompts during upgrades. That feature has been around for over a decade now. The background update stuff uses the Windows task scheduler to schedule update checks, not the maintenance service. (I used to work on the team that at the time owned this stuff)
jules-jules 5y ago
This might get lost but figure if someone knows about it it's here. Old Firefox allowed to double-click between two words and both would get highlighted. This has been removed in the newer versions. Does anybody know if it's possible to manually configure this?
- joecool1029 5y ago
  There's a 3 settings under layout.word_select in about:config. They unfortunately don't do what you're asking, but there is an open bug for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1706990 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1706990
  - jules-jules 5y ago
    Thanks for digging this up! At least I wasn't the only one who seems to have made extensive use of this functionality.
- olejorgenb 5y ago
  Not an answer but you can double-click on a single word, keep the button pressed and drag-select whole words. When you get used to it it's quite useful.
- eyewing 5y ago
  Just tried it on Firefox on MacOS. Double-clicking between two words (maybe a little closer to the left word), highlights both words. Not sure what else to say.
bergheim 5y ago
I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_ than what Microsoft with IE6 ever did. They had their share, but nothing compared to this. At least Microsoft was just a software company. If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. "Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox". I see these comments all the time here. Even in this thread. Firefox. Linux. Postgresql. Wikipedia. Xmms! The WORLD WIDE WEB! Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN (funny how Google made their initial fortunes). AMP would be the least of your worries. Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. All of these open source projects are just mindblowingly awesome. They help people. Me. You. But who cares right? Certainly not the lot with money in the 80/90s that didn't understand how or why this would be important. Which is why all these amazing things happened. Now they do of course. So none of this anymore. Which is why I think humanity is doomed to succumb to our newfound overlords. The Big Four. Five? Six? Seven? Who cares really. A handful. I wish people, especially like what this place definitely represents, would stand up more (including me!). Teach people, politicians, your parents, your siblings, your kids. We understand tech and it's implications. We understand how big tech is now stifling everything. Good luck training a neural network that competes with 50 billion uploaded photos. Facebook, Amazon. Google. Microsoft. But noone will - "it doesn't matter". But make no mistake. It does matter. And humanity is just sitting here. It's like we're heading for this High Class Great Filter. Good thing I'll be dead before all this comes to full fruition. (Sorry for the rant - hope it was still relevant and on point, and I really encourage discussion here!)
- Kye 5y ago
  >> Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. You can get an idea from how much IMDB data costs. They didn't invent it, but they did buy it. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&filters=FulfillmentOptionType%2Cvendor_id&FulfillmentOptionType=AWSDataExchange&vendor_id=0af153a3-339f-48c2-8b42-3b9fa26d3367 https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&fil...
yboris 5y ago
The feature I'm most looking forward to is JPEG XL or .jxl (pronounced "jixel") - the new image format that will replace JPEG in 2022. It's in Firefox nightly: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl https://caniuse.com/jpegxl but the sooner it's in the regular release, the sooner we can all start experimenting with it and using it. https://jpegxl.info/ https://jpegxl.info/
- simondotau 5y ago
  A great codec but a terrible and unmemorable name—from the group that gave us JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPEG XS and JPEG XT. Why take a great codec and name it "XL" which is the Euro/English moniker for extra large? What's so extra large about JPEG XL? Jixel is a great name though. My advice would be for them to quietly rename it Jixel, Jixl or Jxl.
  - jonsneyers 5y ago
    Its media type is image/jxl, the suggested filename extension is .jxl, and the reference implementation is called libjxl. You might notice a pattern :)
rsp1984 5y ago
Last time I used FF on my Macbook (about 2 or 3 years ago) it had a big issue with battery drain (IIRC it was because of high GPU load even when idle). Did they ever fix that?
- cosmojg 5y ago
  Yep, I believe battery usage on MacBooks was massively improved in an update a few months ago. Give it a try and report back!
- iaml 5y ago
  I use ff dev daily and IMO battery life hit compared to safari is still pretty bad.
- jason2323 5y ago
  Still the same. It absolutely heats up my MacBook Pro
ninjahattori 5y ago
I use and love firefox. I feel sad when I see brave, edge and other new browsers chromium based taking a lead. Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the company behind it lacks any kind of vision. Brave has its own search, a better startpage, an ad network. From onboarding to incentivising user, they are doing it all very well.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity. Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chrome" when something is misaligned or broken in Firefox or Safari. I wish I could say it's the project managers, sys admins or the executives who are to blame like in the IE6 days. But painfully it's just lazy or incompetent engineers who don't understand or care about the importance of open and standard tech. When asked to build something they all treat cross browser as an extra and not-essential step and then inflate their estimates or claim it will be quicker if we don't bother. Wish this was isolated to a few people but I feel I'm like 80 young engineers deep who are like this and I think maybe 2 I've worked with in the past 7 years cared about cross browser. If your experience in the industry is different from this, I'm extremely envious.
  - Asooka 5y ago
    If it doesn't work right in Firefox and Chrome, it's probably not standards-conformant and thus at a high probability of breaking when Chrome updates its layout engine. That's how I'd present the argument - making sure it works right across browsers makes your code robust against future changes in behaviour.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    > But painfully it’s just lazy or incompetent engineers There are good arguments in favor of testing and developing for Firefox, but that is not one of them. Representing the interests of the end-user, in a typical SCRUM-ish development house, is supposed to be the product owner’s job, not the job of individual devs. If management isn’t rewarding cross-browser development, then that’s on management, or maybe even on the end-users. Not the devs. Expecting devs to put work into stuff that won’t be rewarded by their bosses if they succeed, and will likely be punished if something goes wrong, is kinda silly. It probably doesn’t matter that much, anyway. Firefox is being killed because some of the most popular websites on the internet are made by a competitor, the vertical monopoly between YouTube and Chrome. Everything else is just a distraction.
Scarbutt 5y ago
Is there a plugin that imitates Chrome's tab groups? I tried tree style tab but it's not the same.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  I don’t know about Chrome tab groups, but I use the Panorama FF plugin for tab groups. I gives a virtual page that you can add group containers and put tabs in them. When you switch groups, the tabs in the window switch to those tabs. I setup groups for each of my projects and this lets me switch project contexts quickly.
  - Scarbutt 5y ago
    Yep, it's very similar to how chrome tab groups, thanks.
boba7 5y ago
Are they still removing features and not fixing bugs?
hendry 5y ago
Compared to Chrome, Firefox lacks two features for me 1. Native Tab search https://youtu.be/HmWqo4X2IB8 https://youtu.be/HmWqo4X2IB8 2. Ability to remember my CC details The feature that Firefox has that my workflow can't live without is simply `Ctrl-Tab` to move quickly between two tabs.
- _Microft 5y ago
  What does native tab search do exactly? Does it search the content of all tabs or does it allow to jump to a tab by typing part of the address or title? Firefox can do the latter by using the % search shortcut in the address bar.
- fabrice_d 5y ago
  In Firefox: 1. Using "% xyz" searches for open tabs matching xyz 2. Not sure since which version, but CC card details can be stored and used with autofill, as are addresses.
  - hendry 5y ago
    RE 2, idk why, it has never worked for me or it's not nearly as smooth as Chrome. Maybe there is some pref I accidentally toggled.
- jeff_carr 5y ago
  The biggest annoyance is the bookmark toolbar icons not transferring or syncing between machines. I don't care about the theoretical tracking issues of favicon.ico. There should be an option to turn on syncing of the bookmark icons.
- guerby 5y ago
  For tab search in firefox do Ctrl-l (to go to the URL bar) then type %xyz will list tabs with xyz in it, select the tab you want and done. Eg to list your HN tabs and go quicky to one of them: ctrl-l %new.y (use arrows then enter)
  - hendry 5y ago
fleddr 5y ago
I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefox's market share went from a 2009 peak (32%) to a mere 3.29% as we speak. Just in the last year alone, it bleeds market share from 4.25% to 3.29%. So it keeps bleeding market share, 12 years in a row. The reason it's still losing market share likely is due to the mobile market still growing in size, whilst Firefox has no presence there: 0.48%. I have access to a handful of web properties, one of which very large and global (billions of page views). In our dashboards, Firefox does not even exist. It's not in the top 10. Above it are Chromium clones most have never heard of. So to the "ordinary" world, those without a particular stake in open source, it's a dead browser. It's even smaller than weird regional browsers that most businesses wouldn't explicitly support. (note that "support" is overstated as most web tech works just fine out of the box in Firefox) Besides the ordinary world, the grip on the developer community is also lost. Increasingly, I'm seeing developers coding up demos and experiments that break in Firefox, it's not even considered at all, where just a few years ago it was a developer-default browser. It's an extremely harsh reality check. Effectively Apple, an enemy of the open web, is our only savior against a full Chromium monopoly. Apple actively sabotaging and blocking the progress of the web, is our "hope". How bad can it get? Anyway, I'm sorry to bring this up, in particular in a release announcement. I bring it up because I believe impact is central to the discussion and trumps any feature and any engineering. If the crash is not reversed somehow, it is inevitable that very hard questions have to be answered. It's not what I would want. I hope an independent implementation will keep existing forever.
- joelthelion 5y ago
  As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?
  - ergot_vacation 5y ago
vernie 5y ago
Does any browser these days support multi-row tabs? I used to use Tab Mix Plus on Firefox but it seems like everyone (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) has adopted WebExtensions which are incapable of this.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Not quite the same, but: Vivaldi has 2 rows of tabs... the 1st row is "tab group" tabs, the 2nd row are the tabs in that group. Easy to manipulate/group them. You could also try tabs on the left edge (vs top).
  - coffeeling 5y ago
    Vivaldi's tab groups have some problem with things like fiddliness (moving tabs between groups etc. is a pain) and grouping tabs doesn't properly update the tab cycling order so Ctrl+Tab can get really unintuitive since the internal structure won't match what is shown.
ozcanberkciftci 5y ago
i think they don't have a chance except just targeting power-users
aklemm 5y ago
After a couple years of half efforts, I'm finally officially off Chrome as my main browser. Hallelujah.
daniel_iversen 5y ago
Just searched the release notes for the last 25 releases (from 80.0 to 90.0) and there seems to be not much work done on battery life / power consumption .. Apart from restoring a browser session on Mac from minimised windows, or a video playback improvement on Windows (fair enough) there hasn't been anything done here, and there are people in this thread that still confirm that battery usage isn't great. That's the main reason holding me back (in fact I'm even considering switching from Brave to Safari with all the privacy improvements they've done over time). Shame really.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Safari's great, and IMO it still counts as supporting the open web because you're supporting standards. No company is going to support "just Chrome and Safari"; it's going to be either "just Chrome" or "everything but IE". Put in your vote for the second.
jhanschoo 5y ago
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask about a certain question regarding extensions. With Chrome, I can control whether extensions update automatically and also have extensions disabled until I activate them for a certain page, and then they remain activated for that session. Do I have such control for Firefox? With it being so difficult to trust extension developers, yet with some extensions being quite necessary for me, I find especially the ability to have extensions deactivated until I explicitly want them for each session very important.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  im not sure whether you can disable them for certain pages but there is a checkbox setting in the extensions page that stops anything from auto-updating. i have this set in my user.js file with this line: user_pref("extensions.update.enabled", "false"); i have nearly 20-25 extensions myself and im pretty sure they are all open source. when i was using chrome (a long time ago) i only had one or two open source and the rest were closed. its helps when you find some extension that does something really basic but you dont know if its trustworthy or not. usually theres not a whole lot of code to look through
tsjq 5y ago
on seeing Firefox Release news these days, I am more anxious to know "what have they killed / spoiled now" than I am excited about "what new features have they added now". sad.
jdlyga 5y ago
I've switched to Firefox since 89. So far, I'm pretty happy.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ta23443766453 5y ago
The alternative to Google, ads, monopolies and crony capitalism is not blindly supporting Firefox, Postgres etc. I think the HN crowd have to invest in learning macroeconomics, philosophy and politics. And a visit to small and medium enterprises in developing countries who rely on these ads for increasing their reach for the lack of better marketplace presence or bad governments. Travel a bit. Meet a few more people. Perhaps a few courses and then use that to lobby local politics and contribute to value driven education at the grassroots level. Support economic reforms. The problem is deeper. If you’re throwing frustration at Google by recommending people to use Firefox, you’re doing it wrong.

the version of firefox previous to Firefox 90.0.1 (90.0.0) worked with Google Meet and my company's firefox profile. I was very excited about not needing to use Chrome anymore. I'm using Firefox 90.0.1 now... I get no sound or video in Google Meet. I had the same problem with recent versions of firefox. I have to use Chrome now for google meet.

ducktective 5y ago

> FTP support has been removed sigh

jszymborski 5y ago
It's my initial reaction too, but if I stop to think of Firefox as a huge, difficult-to-manage project where each feature costs dev resources and increases security risk, FTP support is probably the feature I wouldn't mind removed right next to the Pocket integration.
- handrous 5y ago
  On the one hand I'm OK with removing features to keep the browser slim. OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep. [EDIT] I'd actually be a lot happier with this if FF were more aggressively adding new Internet or alternative-Web protocols, or trying to use their platform to give things like federated social networks more visibility and better prominence (via, say, optional but tastefully promoted integration with the browser). That might also, you know, differentiate them and give me a reason to recommend it to non-nerds again, despite "it's way, way faster than anything else, and lighter on resources, and blocks pop-ups and has tabs and doesn't have an ad banner!" no longer being enough (or even true, for some of those qualities) like it was in the early days.
  - signal11 5y ago
    > OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep. I’m sure someone will correct me, but without looking at the source code, I suspect the following will have played a role in increasing code size since the earliest days of Phoenix: * support for newer media formats, from MP4 through AVIF * DRM maybe? * WebGL * SVG? * The complexity of modern CSS
    - handrous 5y ago
      Much, much bigger JS engine/sandbox, probably. Backwards compat with an ever-growing set of HTML, CSS, and JS. I'd guess a modern CSS engine is several times (dozens of times?) larger than what Phoenix shipped with. I expect their internal UI-drawing code/framework is a lot larger than in the Phoenix days. Webassembly. Canvas. And yeah, several of the other things you mentioned—video used to be the responsibility of plugins, for example. [EDIT] in fact, some things browsers do now were seen as terrible ideas when Phoenix was released, because they would kill performance, since they're so much more expensive than alternatives. Vector graphics were regarded as to-be-avoided for a long time, because they're so much more taxing on the client than raster. CSS doing animations would have been considered insane, fit only for "look how I can bring your machine to a crawl with a web page" demos. Maintaining an entire "shadow DOM" of Javascript objects would have been regarded as parody-levels of resource wasting for all but very niche use-cases. No wonder the modern web is so slow and resource-hungry....
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Or Wasm, or WebRTC, or indexedDB ... plus anything else on that long list: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
  - spiritplumber 5y ago
    Firefox supporting Gemini would be awesome.
- sambe 5y ago
  I don't think my estimate of the cost of FTP maintenance would be as high as yours. Why do you think FTP would still be such a cost at this stage?
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I'm curious what your estimate would be. Mine would be somewhere between 0.5FTE assuming the bare minimum of keep-the-lights-on QA testing for each release and ongoing bug triage up to maybe 3FTE if it requires periodic security and design updates to keep up with changing standards/platforms/protocols.
- coffeeling 5y ago
  The Pocket integration should be about the last thing removed: Independent revenue streams are something Firefox desperately needs.
btgeekboy 5y ago
It’s a terrible protocol not built for the modern internet. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a URL containing “ftp” that isn’t prefixed by http:// http://
- ducktective 5y ago
  Lots of university file dumps are served on FTP...
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    I used to add '+"index of"' when searching for files or dumps using google. It still works, but definitely not as good as a few years ago. A past time: typing '+"index of" main.dfm' to see what people were developing using delphi. '+"index of" dire straits sultans of swing mp3' still kind of works.
    - jmrm 5y ago
      I have tested and still works even with actual and a bit obscure software
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    and a lot more, it's a bit sad to lose ftp
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Why not use an ftp client if you want to use ftp?
      - acwan93 5y ago
        Don't know why this comment is being downvoted. I'd prefer to use another client like Transmit or Cyberduck. Having it all in one browser introduces complexity I don't think the team at Mozilla wants.
metalliqaz 5y ago
I'm actually ok with this. I'm happy to have it open those links in my dedicated tool just like it does with bittorrent links, etc.
gbrown_ 5y ago
It was a convenience but one I can live without. Purely from a LOC view ripping out features from browsers is something I welcome.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Should become extensions then. That’s why they were invented, no?
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Did you use it?
- ducktective 5y ago
  Obviously not as much as HTTP(s) but still there are FTP links which show up after a google search from time to time...I guess now I have to context switch to the file explorer...Thunar is OK but does Windows Explorer even support FTP?
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    There are more mailto: links on the web than ftp: ones, and yet most browsers don't natively do email. Firefox didnt remove the protocol from existence. They just removed a feature nobody uses, which is better handled outside the browser.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      I thought mailto links would open in webmail if configured?
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        You're getting my point. ftp links will open in an ftp client if configured.
    - account42 5y ago
      FTP and HTTP are both about transfering files, SMTP is a very different use case.
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        Use your imagination. And this list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_network_protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_network_protocols
  - 5y ago
theden 5y ago
Have they mentioned the reason of its removal somewhere?
- hannob 5y ago
  It's insecure by default, the TLS-enabled version has never been widely adopted, never been supported by browsers and has some horrible security problems of its own (see alpaca attack). Removing FTP thus fits into the strategy of browser to prefer HTTPS.
vbezhenar 5y ago
IMO browser should focus on HTTP/HTML support. There are plenty of protocols and there are plenty of programs with proper support for those protocols. I don't see nothing wrong with using transmission for torrents, WinSCP for FTP, etc.
- WillDaSilva 5y ago
  I can see where you're coming from - having a browser support all these protocols seems like poor design. Let everything do what they're good at, and all that. But usability suffers when users need to install and open different applications for every protocol they want to use. I think it might be good if there was some robust way to provide low-level browser extensions (that would probably be loaded in as shared objects). That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP, bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the browser by installing the extensions through your package manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites, but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client. In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for people to hand over low-level control of their browser would be problematic.
- no_wizard 5y ago
  Turns out though, they're coming up with a way to support basically any TCP based protocol via WebTransport: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md
Vixel 5y ago
Ahh FTP. The original “cloud storage”.
_peeley 5y ago
Honestly, I'm more than happy to see older/niche protocols removed from web browsers. God knows the average browser contains way, way too much stuff anyway[0], not to mention there are FTP clients that are likely far better for that use case than Firefox would ever be. I wouldn't mind if FF (or other browsers) tightened their scope a little more often and adhered to the Unix philosophy a little more closely. 0: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
coldpie 5y ago
I've just switched to using my file manager for FTP. Works fine.

tapoxi 5y ago

I think Firefox has ~5% of our user base. It's hard to justify running separate tests for it anymore. I wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork because I don't see them crawling back to a meaningful marketshare at this rate. (Yeah I know multiple implementations and all that, but we don't have many people running FreeBSD just to give Linux some competition.)

everdrive 5y ago
> wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork because These already exist, and Chromium is far from perfect. I'm glad there's a viable competitor.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  I'm not sure I'd classify it as viable with how Mozilla middle management has acted the last few years.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    It's at least technically viable for now
- handrous 5y ago
  Safari and, especially, its iOS monopoly (for the engine, at least) are the only thing keeping Google from dominating and nearly everyone from only testing against Chrome, now that MS switched to using Chrome's engine and IE is finally nearing the end even in the important niches where it had been hanging on. FF doesn't have enough "normies" using it, isn't the default anywhere, and its trend-line is heading the wrong direction.
- buu700 5y ago
  In my experience, Firefox actually has better performance than Chrome nowadays — particularly on Apple Silicon, where the difference is stark and dramatic. And with the new "Proton" interface, IMO Firefox finally looks at least as nice as Chrome out of the box. Firefox mobile still has some catching up to do on the overall UI/UX, but it's not too far off, and the fact that it allows extensions is nice.

metalliqaz 5y ago

Honestly I'm still not used to the new tab style that was introduced last time. 90 seems fine, but not much to get excited about from the user perspective.

Hamuko 5y ago
I just made mine look like the old black tab bar again with userChrome.css.
- aendruk 5y ago
  An example for the curious: https://gist.github.com/7accb09dbddd494f53dc889877c1f524 https://gist.github.com/7accb09dbddd494f53dc889877c1f524
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  I ended up just turning the tab bar off and using the Tree Tabs extension
wnevets 5y ago
does anyone know of an about:config to the switch tab style back? Its still hard for me to notice which style is actually selected with Dark Mode
- Cu3PO42 5y ago
  You need to set browser.proton.enabled to false. There's a number of browser.proton.*.enabled settings for various parts of the UI as well.
  - tsjq 5y ago
    thanks. that's helpful.
Proven 5y ago
The new style is bullshit. I've switched to ESR which still uses old tabs and I'll completely get rid of it once it gets updated to the new tab style.

cassianoleal 5y ago

> Now, SmartBlock 2.0 in Firefox 90 eliminates this login problem. Initially, Facebook scripts are all blocked, just as before, ensuring your privacy is preserved. But when you click on the “Continue with Facebook” button to sign in, SmartBlock reacts by quickly unblocking the Facebook login script just in time for the sign-in to proceed smoothly. I wonder how it does that, and if it's open to exploitation by a malicious website like Facebook.

simlevesque 5y ago
Maybe on mouse over or something like that.
- wnevets 5y ago
  Could be related to the isTrusted[1] property to signify the event is caused by an user's action. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTrusted https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTru...
wisniewskit 5y ago
Basically, if a site uses the Facebook SDK to start the authenticaion flow, it will be broken because it's blocked. SmartBlock just stands in for that blocked script, acting just enough like the real API to prevent some common site breakage. This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real one, and continue the login flow. It only unblocks some Facebook resources, as listed here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensions/webcompat/data/shims.js#198 https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensi... It only unblocks it for that specific website (the domain in the tab URL), and only until Firefox is closed. Other trackers continue to be blocked, and other tracking protections stay in place (as opposed to turning off ETP for the site entirely).
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  > This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real one, and continue the login flow. I guess how it detects the "when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow" is the attack vector. If it's Javascript, it's likely to be easily exploitable. If it's in the browser's chrome I suppose it would take a malicious add-on or similar device.

zerop 5y ago

Any article/guide on how big open source projects like firefox, Linux kernel are released? I believe developers around world contribute to code. What's testing, release process like? How to they manage it?

bugmen0t 5y ago
Hi. Firefox developer speaking here. Feel free to take a look at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Process https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Process and https://aosabook.org/en/ffreleng.html https://aosabook.org/en/ffreleng.html. The latter is quite outdated but some core assumptions are still valid. Our CI is hosted at https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=autoland https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=autoland . Every patch that is uploaded will be tested before and after it goes into a branch. Firefox Nightly ships directly from that branch. The changes will be "promoted" to Beta (and subsequently Release) every four weeks. Our community hangs out on Matrix and is very Open to newcomer questions and other contributors. In fact, we Vene have an introduction channel and list good first bugs on bugzilla (searchable through something called "Codetribute")
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dopu 5y ago

Excited that there's more progress being done in implementing proper site isolation. Would be great to not feel like I'm losing something in sticking with FF over Chromium-based browsers.

fsflover 5y ago
If you need real security through isolation, try Qubes OS.
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  For isolation within a Linux instance: firejail, firetools apt-cache search firejail
sambe 5y ago
Does Chrome have better site isolation?
- dopu 5y ago
  This article (https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...) by madaidan goes into quite a bit of detail regarding the security of the two browsers. Things are improving on FF, though.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  Yes. But I believe FF is slowly catching up in this update. There was a post about it here a while ago

wmanley 5y ago

> * Most users without hardware accelerated WebRender will now be using software WebRender. > * Improved software WebRender performance This sounds interesting. Does anyone know where I could read more about this?

muizelaar 5y ago
We plan on writing up some more on Software WebRender some time, but some of the particular changes included in 90 are: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1674396 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1674396 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1700434 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1700434

starik36 5y ago

class foo { #privateClassMethod() {} #privateClassField; } Finally.

jamespwilliams 5y ago
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Classes/Private_class_fields https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... for more details for anyone else curious

johnchristopher 5y ago

> The "Open Image in New Tab" context menu item now opens images and media in a background tab by default. Learn more Ahaaaa ! Yes ! I could have sworn it had been the default behavior and it got changed at some point but I never bothered to track that down. Can anyone confirm ?

forgotpwd16 5y ago
So based on the Learn more link it basically now follows what links do. It'll have been better if images and links had a different option. (And it'll have been much better if View image hadn't been removed.)
pseudalopex 5y ago
The default was the same tab until Firefox 88. They changed it to a new tab to match Chrome. And removed the same tab option because they couldn't imagine why anyone would want it.[1] [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c3 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c3
- Avery3R 5y ago
  If you middle clicked the view in same tab button it would open the link in a background tab instead of the same one.
  - est31 5y ago
    Yeah I did that all the time and the recent change was a regression to me. Now with Firefox 90 I can finally comfortably open things in a background tab again.
- Anthony-G 5y ago
  Thanks for the Bugzilla link. It’s making me think that I should log in to my Bugzilla account more often and look out for issues/requests such as this one. It’s not uncommon for image-hosting sites to use width and height attributes or max-height/max-width styles to get browsers to display high resolution images at a smaller size than the native image (I can often tell by how long it takes for the images to load in the browser). I liked being able to right-click on a image and click the “View image” option from the context menu to open the image in the same tab – at its native resolution. On the much rarer occasion, where there were multiple images on the same page, it was useful to be able to middle-click to open the image in a new background tab. I was annoyed that they removed this ability in Firefox 88 but now I’m doubly disappointed to discover that the reason was to be more like Chrome. It seems kind of pointless to break decades old functionality just so that there’s even less to differentiate Firefox from competing browsers. I understand that it’s good to maintain consistent UI but just because other mainstream browsers change decades-old behaviour in a particular way doesn’t mean that all browsers should do so. Having said that, Mike Hoye provides a reasoned rationale¹ for many of the recent Firefox UI changes that have annoyed and frustrated long-time Firefox users. At least now, with Firefox 90, they’ve changed the new image tab from being a foreground tab to a background tab: this should be less annoying. On a related note, I’ve now had enough time to get used to automatically selecting ‘L’ (instead of ‘A’) when I want to copy a URL into the clipboard (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324). I can live with – and adapt to – such changes if the original functionality isn’t completely removed. Also, I ensure that telemetry is switched on so developers are aware that that users make use of such functionality. Though, in this case, they can’t tell the difference between users right-clicking and choosing “View image” because they explicitly wanted the image in the same tab or because it was the default behaviour. Unfortunately, the UX experts seem to have simply divined that the users who were selecting the “View image” option didn’t really want the pre-existing, long-standing behaviour (open in the same tab. 1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c77 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c77

NelsonMinar 5y ago

Background updates! Hooray! That may sound like a basic table stakes feature but honestly it's a huge improvement. And a lot of other apps do a terrible job of it, particularly on Windows. It's remarkable how many apps require 8, 10 mouse clicks and a restart to install a minor update. Firefox didn't require any clicks but the nag / need to restart was a nuisance. Actually now that I type that I wonder what has changed. I guess the upgrade appears to happen faster because it was done before the restart? I assume Firefox itself still has to be restarted for the update to be effective. (No problem on a Windows system; the OS reboots itself so often Firefox is guaranteed to before too long :-P)

metalliqaz 5y ago
The key here is "while Firefox is not running." They have a maintenance service now that can check for updates when the browser is closed. Personally, I wish they hadn't done that. First, because my browser is always open. But also because I don't need another service.
- dblohm7 5y ago
  That's not how it works, actually. The checks are done by a scheduled task.
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    Are you sure? The OP links to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-maintenance-service https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-maintenanc...
    - dblohm7 5y ago
      The maintenance service is used to avoid UAC prompts during upgrades. That feature has been around for over a decade now. The background update stuff uses the Windows task scheduler to schedule update checks, not the maintenance service. (I used to work on the team that at the time owned this stuff)

jules-jules 5y ago

This might get lost but figure if someone knows about it it's here. Old Firefox allowed to double-click between two words and both would get highlighted. This has been removed in the newer versions. Does anybody know if it's possible to manually configure this?

joecool1029 5y ago
There's a 3 settings under layout.word_select in about:config. They unfortunately don't do what you're asking, but there is an open bug for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1706990 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1706990
- jules-jules 5y ago
  Thanks for digging this up! At least I wasn't the only one who seems to have made extensive use of this functionality.
olejorgenb 5y ago
Not an answer but you can double-click on a single word, keep the button pressed and drag-select whole words. When you get used to it it's quite useful.
eyewing 5y ago
Just tried it on Firefox on MacOS. Double-clicking between two words (maybe a little closer to the left word), highlights both words. Not sure what else to say.

bergheim 5y ago

I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_ than what Microsoft with IE6 ever did. They had their share, but nothing compared to this. At least Microsoft was just a software company. If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. "Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox". I see these comments all the time here. Even in this thread. Firefox. Linux. Postgresql. Wikipedia. Xmms! The WORLD WIDE WEB! Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN (funny how Google made their initial fortunes). AMP would be the least of your worries. Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. All of these open source projects are just mindblowingly awesome. They help people. Me. You. But who cares right? Certainly not the lot with money in the 80/90s that didn't understand how or why this would be important. Which is why all these amazing things happened. Now they do of course. So none of this anymore. Which is why I think humanity is doomed to succumb to our newfound overlords. The Big Four. Five? Six? Seven? Who cares really. A handful. I wish people, especially like what this place definitely represents, would stand up more (including me!). Teach people, politicians, your parents, your siblings, your kids. We understand tech and it's implications. We understand how big tech is now stifling everything. Good luck training a neural network that competes with 50 billion uploaded photos. Facebook, Amazon. Google. Microsoft. But noone will - "it doesn't matter". But make no mistake. It does matter. And humanity is just sitting here. It's like we're heading for this High Class Great Filter. Good thing I'll be dead before all this comes to full fruition. (Sorry for the rant - hope it was still relevant and on point, and I really encourage discussion here!)

Kye 5y ago
>> Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. You can get an idea from how much IMDB data costs. They didn't invent it, but they did buy it. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&filters=FulfillmentOptionType%2Cvendor_id&FulfillmentOptionType=AWSDataExchange&vendor_id=0af153a3-339f-48c2-8b42-3b9fa26d3367 https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&fil...

yboris 5y ago

The feature I'm most looking forward to is JPEG XL or .jxl (pronounced "jixel") - the new image format that will replace JPEG in 2022. It's in Firefox nightly: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl https://caniuse.com/jpegxl but the sooner it's in the regular release, the sooner we can all start experimenting with it and using it. https://jpegxl.info/ https://jpegxl.info/

simondotau 5y ago
A great codec but a terrible and unmemorable name—from the group that gave us JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPEG XS and JPEG XT. Why take a great codec and name it "XL" which is the Euro/English moniker for extra large? What's so extra large about JPEG XL? Jixel is a great name though. My advice would be for them to quietly rename it Jixel, Jixl or Jxl.
- jonsneyers 5y ago
  Its media type is image/jxl, the suggested filename extension is .jxl, and the reference implementation is called libjxl. You might notice a pattern :)

rsp1984 5y ago

Last time I used FF on my Macbook (about 2 or 3 years ago) it had a big issue with battery drain (IIRC it was because of high GPU load even when idle). Did they ever fix that?

cosmojg 5y ago
Yep, I believe battery usage on MacBooks was massively improved in an update a few months ago. Give it a try and report back!
iaml 5y ago
I use ff dev daily and IMO battery life hit compared to safari is still pretty bad.
jason2323 5y ago
Still the same. It absolutely heats up my MacBook Pro

ninjahattori 5y ago

I use and love firefox. I feel sad when I see brave, edge and other new browsers chromium based taking a lead. Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the company behind it lacks any kind of vision. Brave has its own search, a better startpage, an ad network. From onboarding to incentivising user, they are doing it all very well.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity. Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chrome" when something is misaligned or broken in Firefox or Safari. I wish I could say it's the project managers, sys admins or the executives who are to blame like in the IE6 days. But painfully it's just lazy or incompetent engineers who don't understand or care about the importance of open and standard tech. When asked to build something they all treat cross browser as an extra and not-essential step and then inflate their estimates or claim it will be quicker if we don't bother. Wish this was isolated to a few people but I feel I'm like 80 young engineers deep who are like this and I think maybe 2 I've worked with in the past 7 years cared about cross browser. If your experience in the industry is different from this, I'm extremely envious.
- Asooka 5y ago
  If it doesn't work right in Firefox and Chrome, it's probably not standards-conformant and thus at a high probability of breaking when Chrome updates its layout engine. That's how I'd present the argument - making sure it works right across browsers makes your code robust against future changes in behaviour.
- notriddle 5y ago
  > But painfully it’s just lazy or incompetent engineers There are good arguments in favor of testing and developing for Firefox, but that is not one of them. Representing the interests of the end-user, in a typical SCRUM-ish development house, is supposed to be the product owner’s job, not the job of individual devs. If management isn’t rewarding cross-browser development, then that’s on management, or maybe even on the end-users. Not the devs. Expecting devs to put work into stuff that won’t be rewarded by their bosses if they succeed, and will likely be punished if something goes wrong, is kinda silly. It probably doesn’t matter that much, anyway. Firefox is being killed because some of the most popular websites on the internet are made by a competitor, the vertical monopoly between YouTube and Chrome. Everything else is just a distraction.

Scarbutt 5y ago

Is there a plugin that imitates Chrome's tab groups? I tried tree style tab but it's not the same.

Tagbert 5y ago
I don’t know about Chrome tab groups, but I use the Panorama FF plugin for tab groups. I gives a virtual page that you can add group containers and put tabs in them. When you switch groups, the tabs in the window switch to those tabs. I setup groups for each of my projects and this lets me switch project contexts quickly.
- Scarbutt 5y ago
  Yep, it's very similar to how chrome tab groups, thanks.

boba7 5y ago

Are they still removing features and not fixing bugs?

hendry 5y ago

Compared to Chrome, Firefox lacks two features for me 1. Native Tab search https://youtu.be/HmWqo4X2IB8 https://youtu.be/HmWqo4X2IB8 2. Ability to remember my CC details The feature that Firefox has that my workflow can't live without is simply `Ctrl-Tab` to move quickly between two tabs.

_Microft 5y ago
What does native tab search do exactly? Does it search the content of all tabs or does it allow to jump to a tab by typing part of the address or title? Firefox can do the latter by using the % search shortcut in the address bar.
fabrice_d 5y ago
In Firefox: 1. Using "% xyz" searches for open tabs matching xyz 2. Not sure since which version, but CC card details can be stored and used with autofill, as are addresses.
- hendry 5y ago
  RE 2, idk why, it has never worked for me or it's not nearly as smooth as Chrome. Maybe there is some pref I accidentally toggled.
jeff_carr 5y ago
The biggest annoyance is the bookmark toolbar icons not transferring or syncing between machines. I don't care about the theoretical tracking issues of favicon.ico. There should be an option to turn on syncing of the bookmark icons.
guerby 5y ago
For tab search in firefox do Ctrl-l (to go to the URL bar) then type %xyz will list tabs with xyz in it, select the tab you want and done. Eg to list your HN tabs and go quicky to one of them: ctrl-l %new.y (use arrows then enter)
- hendry 5y ago

fleddr 5y ago

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefox's market share went from a 2009 peak (32%) to a mere 3.29% as we speak. Just in the last year alone, it bleeds market share from 4.25% to 3.29%. So it keeps bleeding market share, 12 years in a row. The reason it's still losing market share likely is due to the mobile market still growing in size, whilst Firefox has no presence there: 0.48%. I have access to a handful of web properties, one of which very large and global (billions of page views). In our dashboards, Firefox does not even exist. It's not in the top 10. Above it are Chromium clones most have never heard of. So to the "ordinary" world, those without a particular stake in open source, it's a dead browser. It's even smaller than weird regional browsers that most businesses wouldn't explicitly support. (note that "support" is overstated as most web tech works just fine out of the box in Firefox) Besides the ordinary world, the grip on the developer community is also lost. Increasingly, I'm seeing developers coding up demos and experiments that break in Firefox, it's not even considered at all, where just a few years ago it was a developer-default browser. It's an extremely harsh reality check. Effectively Apple, an enemy of the open web, is our only savior against a full Chromium monopoly. Apple actively sabotaging and blocking the progress of the web, is our "hope". How bad can it get? Anyway, I'm sorry to bring this up, in particular in a release announcement. I bring it up because I believe impact is central to the discussion and trumps any feature and any engineering. If the crash is not reversed somehow, it is inevitable that very hard questions have to be answered. It's not what I would want. I hope an independent implementation will keep existing forever.

joelthelion 5y ago
As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?
- ergot_vacation 5y ago

vernie 5y ago

Does any browser these days support multi-row tabs? I used to use Tab Mix Plus on Firefox but it seems like everyone (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) has adopted WebExtensions which are incapable of this.

Tempest1981 5y ago
Not quite the same, but: Vivaldi has 2 rows of tabs... the 1st row is "tab group" tabs, the 2nd row are the tabs in that group. Easy to manipulate/group them. You could also try tabs on the left edge (vs top).
- coffeeling 5y ago
  Vivaldi's tab groups have some problem with things like fiddliness (moving tabs between groups etc. is a pain) and grouping tabs doesn't properly update the tab cycling order so Ctrl+Tab can get really unintuitive since the internal structure won't match what is shown.

ozcanberkciftci 5y ago

i think they don't have a chance except just targeting power-users

aklemm 5y ago

After a couple years of half efforts, I'm finally officially off Chrome as my main browser. Hallelujah.

daniel_iversen 5y ago

Just searched the release notes for the last 25 releases (from 80.0 to 90.0) and there seems to be not much work done on battery life / power consumption .. Apart from restoring a browser session on Mac from minimised windows, or a video playback improvement on Windows (fair enough) there hasn't been anything done here, and there are people in this thread that still confirm that battery usage isn't great. That's the main reason holding me back (in fact I'm even considering switching from Brave to Safari with all the privacy improvements they've done over time). Shame really.

brundolf 5y ago
Safari's great, and IMO it still counts as supporting the open web because you're supporting standards. No company is going to support "just Chrome and Safari"; it's going to be either "just Chrome" or "everything but IE". Put in your vote for the second.

jhanschoo 5y ago

I guess this is as good a place as any to ask about a certain question regarding extensions. With Chrome, I can control whether extensions update automatically and also have extensions disabled until I activate them for a certain page, and then they remain activated for that session. Do I have such control for Firefox? With it being so difficult to trust extension developers, yet with some extensions being quite necessary for me, I find especially the ability to have extensions deactivated until I explicitly want them for each session very important.

mackrevinack 5y ago
im not sure whether you can disable them for certain pages but there is a checkbox setting in the extensions page that stops anything from auto-updating. i have this set in my user.js file with this line: user_pref("extensions.update.enabled", "false"); i have nearly 20-25 extensions myself and im pretty sure they are all open source. when i was using chrome (a long time ago) i only had one or two open source and the rest were closed. its helps when you find some extension that does something really basic but you dont know if its trustworthy or not. usually theres not a whole lot of code to look through

tsjq 5y ago

on seeing Firefox Release news these days, I am more anxious to know "what have they killed / spoiled now" than I am excited about "what new features have they added now". sad.

jdlyga 5y ago

I've switched to Firefox since 89. So far, I'm pretty happy.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ta23443766453 5y ago

The alternative to Google, ads, monopolies and crony capitalism is not blindly supporting Firefox, Postgres etc. I think the HN crowd have to invest in learning macroeconomics, philosophy and politics. And a visit to small and medium enterprises in developing countries who rely on these ads for increasing their reach for the lack of better marketplace presence or bad governments. Travel a bit. Meet a few more people. Perhaps a few courses and then use that to lobby local politics and contribute to value driven education at the grassroots level. Support economic reforms. The problem is deeper. If you’re throwing frustration at Google by recommending people to use Firefox, you’re doing it wrong.