Firefox 62.0 Released
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
I'm mentioning this here just so I can tell Vimperator / Pentadactyl / VimFx users that there are loads of options you can replace your old extensions with, some of which are... okay.
Links follow in increasing order of user-friendliness:
https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl [^]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_f...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
[^] Disclaimer: I develop this one. If you've tried it before in the past, now might be a good time to try it again. We've just pushed out a release that moved quite a lot of code around, hopefully eliminating a whole class of bugs, especially relating to ignore mode and multiple windows.
Simply put, you cannot count on the keyboard shortcuts to work consistently throughout Firefox. They do not work in built-in pages (such as errors). They do not work when inside an input field in GTK. There's no way to consistently override built-in FF shortcuts that simply get in the way.
It's pretty sad for users which expect the keyboard experience to be consistent. I now mostly use FF's own shortcuts for most of the tab-management actions, since those are the only ones that work most of the time when an error page is generated.
Personally I just hit Ctrl-W to close tabs when I get to somewhere I can't use it. `fixamo` and `set csp clobber` mean that I only really ever get trapped in PDFs (as I rarely open about: pages except to do a specific thing and then immediately close them).
I feel like this is a symptom of a larger issue: if Firefox is a GTK app (in Linux), why is it up to Firefox to decide how to resolve these inputs? Shouldn't it be GTK doing that? Ergo, shouldn't the "vi-ization" be occurring at the GTK level, and so apply to all GTK apps loaded by the user?
> They do not work in built-in pages (such as errors).
That's certainly dumb, though.
Otherwise, it's usually YouTube. I just only interact with the videos using the mouse (or MPV via `;v`) and make sure to click outside them afterwards.
I do have a trackpoint on all of my keyboards, so I don't really notice having to click the mouse because it's just another keyboard button, so I might not be the most representative person here.
I'm on a phone and it looks like bovine3dom is fielding questions so I'll just chime in with my pitch.
If you're willing to get your hands dirty in the name of power, please do give Tridactyl a go - the new webextension model limits add-ons pretty sharply, but I feel that Tridactyl pushes those limits much harder than the alternatives. It's one of the main reasons I'm on Firefox instead of Chrome. Tridactyl is also under more active and aggressive development ([1] vs. [2]); for example, I think that one of our other contributors is in the process of pushing a fix to Firefox's permissions API so we can get even closer to the line. If you want features or fixes, come on over to our issues page or chats and let us know!
1: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/pulse/monthly 2: https://github.com/philc/vimium/pulse/monthly
1. key n used to traverse through all the found elements doesn't work properly.
2. The add on doesn't work when I am using pdf preview.
I believe I am using the most updated version of the plugin (last checked yesterday as of this comment).
I hope you look into this. If I am missing something please let me know.
Again thank you for the awesome work. If you have some time I would love to pick your brain about a few things.
2. Yeah. The annoying thing is it used to but apparently that was an oversight and there is some security hole there that Mozilla fixed. Amusingly, they have a secret god-mode permission that they give to their own Screenshot extension that makes it work on PDFs. A chap from OneNote was complaining about lack of PDF access the other day so maybe Mozilla will find some sort of solution.
We could bundle pdf.js with Tridactyl, hijack requests to PDFs and send you to our own reader, but I haven't been annoyed enough to resort to that as I personally just use Okular which is far better at rendering anyway.
Happy to chat in this thread or on Riot.
That is a bummer. I have pinned FF to 52 ESR so that the extensions I use keep working. I am running out of viable browsers.
Your addons look quite impressive. I use vim all the time. I had no idea that addon existed.
Is anyone backing up these things, both for continued use, e.g. by Pale Moon users or whomever else, and for history / the public record / study / etc.?
Pale Moon already has its own extension page [1], so if you care particularly strongly you might want to talk to them about it.
Some people will base their decisions on which software to try/use, based on the general sentiment of discussions on Hacker News. For example, suppose you suddenly had the need for Email As A Service. Which of the plethora of services will you choose to use? I believe a lot of Hacker News users will weight their decisions at least in part on HN comments discussing those services.
The same goes for Firefox. If all people ever see is criticism, that is likely to drive people away from Firefox. That means less revenue for Mozilla, which means a worse browser for us.
Basically I'm saying that compliments, positive comments, are not useless. Quite the opposite.
(Don't get me wrong. I completely agree with you that criticism is necessary. I'm not saying those comments are bad. I'm saying positive comments serve an important function too.)
And besides, suppose you were a Firefox developer reading these comment threads. Don't you think the positive comments can provide a bit of encouragement?
Mozilla should know not only what it is doing wrong, but also what it is doing right. And that goes for any software and any company.
By that measure, they will completely turn off their computer because every single product is primarily criticism here. I also think substanceless praise is mostly useless in this forum (not in life) and I appreciate everyone here that points to specific points and issues instead of needless bloviation. I think encouragement, praise, etc can/should occur elsewhere and we can get to the meat of the product. It's like complaining that your QA team never opens JIRA issues saying you did a good job...that's not the best use of that communication platform.
What is different about "life" that makes substanceless praise useful?
I hope that your manager doesn't think that way. :)
You'd probably be right, too: the current browsers are marvels of technology that keep getting better, whilst the Websites are getting worse.
My only real complaint is that `about:config` preferences have no descriptions, despite their names not always being descriptive. Chrome's `about:flags` is much better in this regard.
Still, it doesn't force report megabytes worth of data per day to the mothership, unlike Chrome...
So it might seem to you that no power user could possibly be totally happy, I am happy to prove you wrong.
The problem is that Firefox makes these promises and builds a platform (in this case, old-school XUL-powered extensions), builds a profitable user-base from said platform, and then yanks features at a whim. It is almost like a classic bait-and-switch but played in slow motion. In the case of Firefox there simply aren't suitable replacements available for many add-ons because the APIs and underlying features they relied on are being pulled. And they are being pulled because of managerial decisions, made to metrics that only highlight majority use-cases, in the name of "saving programmer bandwidth". As a result, a popular, powerful, useful program more and becomes more like a disposable appliance and less like an extension of the mind.
"Who cares about nice ideals like mind extensions blah blah blah" you think? Well, a lot of users do (especially us old nerds), many of us who have stuck by Mozilla and will willingly dance to their beat in exchange for the company's historical sense of economy in its asks and respect for its userbase.
If Mozilla were making Firefox out of the kindness of their hearts, maybe you would have an argument. But Mozilla is a million-dollar business and much of what has become of their flagship browser lately is a result of business decisions to bring in more money, so I have a hard time understanding how legitimate user complaints could be considered "entitled".
Increasingly, that means having a Web browser that is secure and fast, even at the expense of taking out features that some users really wanted. I've been using Firefox since the start (you can find my name on the famous NYT advert), and they have not removed a single feature that I care about.
On the contrary, I am now happier with Firefox that I have been for many years.
It really makes me sick. Tyranny of the majority writ large. (And while I write this from within Firefox, I am definitely not a very happy user of it any more.)
You're right about Mozilla's nonprofit status -- but it is easy to forget about with all the various business partnerships they seem to enter. It makes me wonder just how much of this nonprofit is really spent funding development/advocacy...
Firefox is fast, modern, feature rich, and, free browser. Your grievance is about missing some feature that you use.
The right analogy would be that the church is providing perfectly nutritious food that majority of the people eat, but a homeless guy is griping about not having wine with the meal. After all the homeless guy is old now and he is used to having wine with meals.
I'm not happy with the changes they've been making but it's still the best browser by a longshot. If you're just taking defaults, Chrome is acceptable but it's not flexible enough for me.
Even with the bad decisions (removing native RSS support was a huge blow for me), Firefox is still better than it's ever been. They need to be careful though as paradoxically as it is, they're also on a knife's edge of ruining it with the face of that being this Pocket thing.
We had to blacklist google in the devices' firewalls to make all the transmissions stop
Edge/Safari- designed for the best interests of the machine.
Chrome- designed to operate in the best interests of Google.
Firefox- designed for the best interests of the user.
I can see an argument for Firefox, and Edge/Safari until we have better battery technology. I can't explain why anyone informed would willingly choose a browser designed to further the interests of a publicly traded, vulture capitalist corporation. Marketing is powerful on mediocre minds.
But I've quit suggesting it to others. They can use Chrome all they want.
When majority of power users stop suggesting it to users around them, Firefox has no future anymore.
But yes once in a while I still have to restart it when its memory usage and responsiveness become a problem (used to have an extension to have a restart entry in the menu, killed as many others by the new system, yeah for progress).
In fact I use Chrome more since Quantum, ironically.
- don’t use browser navigation
- need a specific login to have any use
- they are pinned,and I never close them, ever
With that in mind, I stopped thinking about them as web sites, and use chrome windows as application containers, while doing all my browsing and search in firefox.
I wish there was a simple way to have dedicated chrome windows acting as independant applications, like Gears was. For now it’s just too much friction to my taste to have each site in an electron style wrapping.
Here you are: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
What should be its "own independent program"? Where do we draw that line? Why should we be constrained to our own offline system, when the web enables millions of (more) user-friendly use-cases?
I'm an edge case, but nearly everything. I prefer to not only "own" the program so that I may use it beyond the lifespan of the creator or hosting company supports it but I also prefer to own my files (cloud storage is prohibitively expensive for me). At $0.02 per GB per month I would be spending in excess of >$4,000/yr - and that's just my photos. It would be in excess of $10,000/yr if I also wanted to store videos.
For me to move into an "online, cloud-based software" world online storage would have to be price competitive with purchasing my own local storage for the TB's of data I have and the software would have to be fast enough to work on the files and work with whichever cloud storage I was using. (Let's also pretend that internet is always-present and always-fast-enough.)
On the note of expensive cloud storage... non-affiliated shout-out to Backblaze. I'm probably a borderline "abusive user", $5/mo is an absolute steal to backup the huge amount of data I backup with them.
I want to be able to remove my network card and still have programs which work. I want to own everything about my own PC and all the data that enters or leaves it. When everything's in the browser, that's not possible, because you're essentially turning a PC back into a network terminal. I want my computer to be mine. I want my data to be mine. I do not want anyone or any program to have the authority to edit data on my PC over a network without my clear consent. And if you say that installing and/or activating the browser executable means I'm giving consent to it to edit data freely on my machine, then I think I'm going to need to go a different way than the Web.
We need the freedom to have our own computers, our own thoughts, our own data. We need to be able to say at a user level that we wish to interact with this data in our way, rather than "the Web way". Not every piece of data needs to be viewed or manipulated in a way that works in a Web browser. And the processor load should absolutely be a concern. A well-written and optimized program written in asm will always run faster and better when compared to a "program" written in a web-deployed JavaScript on top of a browser.
Why should we be constrained by the lowest common denominator of the Web, when having the ability to use our own offline system enables the use of millions of more user-focused use-cases?
In my experience Firefox handles a large amount of tabs very well, while Chrome tends to eat a lot more RAM in the same situation (while doing its best to hide that fact).
On the other hand there are some websites that will easily demand a gigabyte of RAM on their own, or that use excessive amounts of CPU time. Chrome handles those cases much better than Firefox. But those are outliers, and if I have to visit them I just open them in Chrome.
For comparison, I currently have two browser windows open and zero tabs. One is this comment box, the other is a GitHub page. Firefox is using a grand total of 3GB RAM, about 700MB of which is for the WebExtensions process so figure about 2.3GB for a grand total of two pages.
This is actually an improvement on the way things used to be, but if I quit the browser now (as I probably will soon regardless), these same two pages would take up only about 200MB, which is still a lot for what it is displaying and running, and the WebExtensions process would reset to about 200-300MB. I have Waterfox running in the background too, basically Firefox 56, which I use for a single website with exactly one extension taking up over a gig by itself with a single page open.
I'm not complaining, again, it's a fact of life that I've accepted and it doesn't hurt me any, but if I changed my habits I have doubts about how much I would actually use Firefox. Maybe I still would after considering my other options, but the web isn't as interesting as it used to be and I have other means of getting what I want off it now so I don't really require a web browser I can throw a million tabs at since tabs themselves are pretty harmful.
That said, if there are browsers that do a better job nowadays, and I stopped looking a long time ago, I'm not convinced they would do much better than Firefox currently does.
Second, it sounds like you have quite a few addons running that each hold quite a bit of data in memory (like ad blockers). Try safe mode and see if behavior changes (though ads may now swallow quite a bit of memory now).
Every single performance complaint I've seen post Quantum release has been from a Mac user.
don't really think a bloated spa is ff's fault..
my standalone slack on macos takes ~500M
But the changes Mozilla did in recent years convinced me to come back and it has been great!
The only reason that I have Chrome installed is for the occasional website that absolutely requires something in Flash, and that's usually some online training thing.
Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features.
I don't think these are the features being referred to when people complain about "browser bloat", Mozilla. I expect Chrome to push me to use remote services, but I don't want that from Mozilla. I know it's a trope to complain about Firefox becoming a Chrome clone, but it feels truer every release.
To give you an example of a maintenance burden in the bookmarking system, the bookmarking system uses a bunch of synchronous APIs. Mozilla is trying to cut down or eliminate use of those APIs, to reduce UI hangs among other reasons, and in order to do that a bunch of bookmarking code needs to be rewritten.
You may have decided that you don't care about this particular kind of bloat, but all unnecessary maintenance burdens distract developers from doing work I'm sure you do care about.
Here is the bug for removing descriptions:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890
Here is a sub-bug that discusses issues with synchronous APIs.
But bookmark descriptions? Really? That's ridiculous. WebGL, or WebVR, or Pocket, maybe, those could be a burden. But BOOKMARK DESCRIPTIONS?
Maybe the existing bookmarking system is crap and you need to re-implement it. You can put descriptions in the new implementation, in a few minutes - it's just another optional text field/property. Unless the goal is just to remove all bookmarking whatsoever. And instead of being honest about that, you're passive-aggressively trying to get people to stop using them first, by crippling them in various ways for obviously bogus reasons.
> Nonetheless, I'd argue that it's a matter of PR among the subset of users most likely to champion Firefox.
> When the reading list functionality just vanished on me one day and I rushed to make a backup of reading-list.sqlite in case it got deleted later, it did not leave me with a very good impression of Mozilla. (rather than, for example, seeing that it had been migrated to a folder in the bookmarks store.)
> (In fact, I'm currently working on an external utility, to be integrated via WebExtensions, to store all persistent state which I don't feel I can trust Firefox to preserve when 52 ESR drops away. This approach to retiring bookmark descriptions only leaves me feeling more justified in the view that I can't trust Mozilla with my data.)
The API needed to change to support things like a generational garbage collector. The set of needed API changes was quite large.
Now the project had two options: Make the changes incrementally or all at once. The incremental option would mean API changes with each release until all the changes got made. The all at once option would mean you'd need to do a complete rewrite of all the relevant mozjs code and all the relevant Firefox code all landing in a single release. Since the time needed for that rewrite was measured in years, that would mean maintaining a branch and dealing with all the merge conflicts from other ongoing work. In practice, it would have meant a much slower pace of web-facing JS feature development at best; more likely a complete stop to that.
Given those choices, the JS team went for the incremental route. Yes, it was painful for API consumers who needed to be running against current versions. But in this case, I expect it was the right tradeoff.
I should also note that V8 breaks API compat regularly, though not to the extent that SpiderMonkey had to, due to being designed 15 years later with many benefits of hindsight.
[Disclosure: I work on Firefox, closely with the JS team but not on the JS team.]
But it's still hard to swallow -- given the really, truly amazing engineering work that's been coming out of Mozilla (Rust and Servo are what I'm thinking of), and the gargantuan effort going into those -- that the APIs involved in the bookmarking system couldn't be improved. Looked at from another angle, if Mozilla can afford to put some resources into keeping Thunderbird alive, surely it can afford some resources to improve bookmarking code to avoid axing some fairly basic features.
In that case, understandable they chose to remove them.
Exactly. There is no point to compete with Google for "browser for Uncle Joe", Google won that battle. The power user browser niche is what Firefox could take instead. But no, let's chase after the leader by his rules, look at how good is Blackberry doing.
Yes there is.
For Firefox to be useful, websites need to work in it. That means web developers need to test in it. And that means that the demographics that they target need to have enough Firefox users to justify testing it. That means there needs to be a sizable portion of Firefox users in every major demographic.
Otherwise it'll be right back to where we were with IE6, except unlike back then, Google Chrome isn't abandonware that just happens to ship with Windows.
I don't know what is 'a significant share' when we are talking about power users. Not to say a significant share of power users disabled telemetry completely so we can't say anything about their share using this feature.
It basically means: worth tailoring to, given precious UI space and limited developer resources. Of course there's no fixed share that "worth tailoring to" can be translated to universally. It's a judgement call.
Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%?
I doubt this one even met the 1% bar. Would you agree that it's reasonable if not necessary to draw a line somewhere?
> Not to say a significant share of power users disabled telemetry completely so we can't say anything about their share using this feature.
What we can at the very least do is reason about features and why and how people would use them, and we can collect anecdotal evidence.
I consider myself a power user. I have never used this feature in more than a decade, and have a hard time imagining what important thing people would do with it.
How much precious developer time is required maintain a user-facing text field on an entity with only a handful of other fields? Certainly not enough to properly justify a feature regression with user-data loss.
> Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%?
IMHO, you're thinking about power users incorrectly. Power users aren't as cookie-cutter as regular users, so you shouldn't expect them all to use an identical set of features. For instance, say you have 100 power user features. It wouldn't surprise me if none of those features passed 1% usage, but 90% of power users use at least one of them. Get rid of them all due to "low usage according to telemetry" and you've just created regressions for 90% of your power users.
The description removal blocked improvements to bookmarking that will actually affect a significant share of users:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?maxdepth...
It'll definitely take more effort than maintaining a restrictive, dumbed-down app; but it's certainly not impossible and I think the benefit is worth it.
There isn't one kind of "power user," especially for something like a web browser. If you want to support power users, you probably will need to support hundreds of specialized features, many of which won't be used my everyone. If you don't do that, then I think it's very unlikely that you support power users [1]. Apps with feature-sets like this exist, so I think it's wrong to make a blanket statement that it's unsustainable.
I'm not saying it's always sustainable either: if you're a two man team at a small company, you probably can't manage to support much more than the core user group. However, Mozilla's big and I think they need to offer something unique compared to Chrome and Safari.
[1] As opposed to developers or extension-writers. My definition of power user excludes people who extensively modify the software themselves.
Mozilla is tiny compared to the size of the Chrome team.
> In that case, understandable they chose to remove them.
It's not understandable. That logic leads to dumbed-down, point-and-grunt products because the "telemetry" shows most users aren't power users.
Anyway, how much effort does it really take to maintain a text field on a bookmark entity?
Unrelated, but dear god that bug tracker was infuriating to read. As in I had a strong desire to reach through the screen and shake a few by the shoulders asking "What the FUCK is wrong with you people?!"
Concern over data loss nearly dismissed out of hand, a smug "you should have backups" response to intentionally caused data loss, and all this over what amounts to a property field on a bookmark... It's like I was reading the GNOME tracker!
All this over "maintenance burden". Is the "maintenace burden" of a non-searchable field that's only visible in a single context really that high? Really? It seems like this is quickly becoming the go-to excuse to eliminate power user features in a way that those users will not see until its too late. "Developer" is already a subset of "power user", and "developer who reads the bug tracker for unwanted future surprises" is an even smaller subset.
My thought too! Legacy extension APIs are one thing. An extra DB column / key:value pair is nothing.
That means, do not reveal information to any server - and I mean any - if I have a server on my network, don't let my user settings leak there. Do not rely on an external, insecure, website to do what your browser should. And all websites are insecure - I am not the only person to deal with the server from bare metal up, that means there are twice as many security risks as there are abstractions from me plugging my computer directly into that computer.
If you want "telemetry", give me a button in my options menu to compile the report, in human-readable plaintext, and then, only after I approve it, ask me to send that text file through sFTP to a server I can log into with a one-time username and password, with 1024bit encryption minimum. I would be okay with sending a monthly report, after having confirmed that it does in fact contain no information whatsoever that could be used to deanonymize me. Anything more than once a month per user is extreme, and means that the devs are being overloaded with data so they don't have time to manually code.
How about instead making them more useful and searching the field?
> they are fetched from the page at the bookmarking time
That I wouldn't mind removing, but not having a proper place to add some notes about the bookmark seems silly.
Oh if only there were some engine inside, like SQLite or something.
Firefox has problems with data loss. I have lost my open tabs on multiple occasions in scenarios where it's totally possible to recover the entire data (just using atomic writes). Recently, I mistakenly opened FF 52 instead of FF 61 (Debian has 52), and all my bookmarks were deleted. Luckily I had a backup of the user profile so that I survived that. I like FF, but I cannot trust it with my data one bit. And now it's no more only mistakes but it's intentional, user-hostile design decisions.
And yes, I'm still salty about no longer being able to set showOneOffButtons to false :)
(I've stopped using FireFox since the new extensions model doesn't allow this misfeature to be fixed with extensions anymore)
The bookmarking system is being downgraded to the point of uselessness, at this point I'd switch back to Chrome.
> any of the chromium based browsers, which all seem to be "de-googled"
Are there many of them?
https://github.com/QupZilla/qupzilla/blob/master/CHANGELOG
Looking at the Falkon repo (https://phabricator.kde.org/source/falkon/) there were commits made just a couple days ago. So, it looks like its being actively developed. There is also a fair amount of mailing list chatter.
Yes, there are a ton of chromium forked browsers: (random link with a long list of alternative browsers, almost all of them have some tie to ff or chrome) http://www.canadiancontent.net/tech/downloads/Internet-Brows...
As far as android versions, I don't know what the plans are, you could ask them. AFAIK, Qupzilla didn't support any mobile platforms, although QT does iOS & Android. I'm sure they would take a pull request <wink>
[Edit: typos]
...and creating APIs so that extensions can handle the functionality instead.
You cannot create an restricted API for everything, the very point of extensions, plugins, addons is community is always bigger than your developers team, and much, much more diverse. The 'long tail' effect is what extensions community is about, not '90 per cent of users'. 90 per cent of users might need just a couple of the same extensions, the other 10 per cent of users need a thousand of different extensions.
Hmm, now to check up on xulrunner....
For example, extensions that use the tabs WebExtension API are significantly more varied than the removed Panorama feature.
That's why every software project having a user community has theme support.
If they were actually doing that, I'd be first in line for their defense, but they aren't. Additionally, they keep shoving in features that should be extensions.
There's a number of new APIs in the pipeline[1] with additional experimental prototypes in various stages of progress[2].
1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Projects#New_WebExtension_A...
But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use case.
Can you capture a profile using steps from [0] and send them to us/me?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_qua...
I have a question. Where are you guys at with this issue?
The thing is, literally every retina resolution Macbook I've tried this on (3 different machines) resulted in massive CPU hog with 4 tabs open on a few basic websites. Let's say they are reddit, hn, and youtube.
The Awesome bar is slow, switching tabs is slow, computer warms up in 15 seconds. Fans kick in, the rest is history. New profile, existing profile, it doesn't matter.
That goes for every single release after 57, including Developers, Beta, and Nightly builds.
15 inch ones are worse than 13.
This doesn't happen when I use external screen.
My feeling is in order to reproduce the issue one has to - Find a Macbook Pro released after 2012. - Open Firefox with aforementioned websites - Try to interact with the websites
Are there any active issues for it?
I remember this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
All dependent bugs are fixed, but alas, it made no difference.
Is there's anything I could do to help resolve this?
You might try the nightly and see if it's already fixed.
I'm kinda hoping more Quantum / Webrender stuff will fix things in the future.
Yay, I always wanted to see more spam in it!
(had the "fun" experience of needing to figure out again how to disable new spammy things from new tab page on mobile despite having already done so before)
"buzzfeednews: Teachers are moonlighting as instagram influencers to make ends meet" trending
"vox: a history of happiness explains why capitalism makes us feel empty inside" trending
"theguardian: chanel shoes, but no salary: how one woman exposed the scandal of the french fashion industry" trending
I have never visited those pages before. I had clean new tab pages showing only most commonly visited pages before, and suddenly automatically this stuff appeared in it now. I consider this spam, yes.
Also, for most commonly visited pages, all it gives me is an orange square with only an "R" in it for reddit or a green square with an "N" in it for hacker news, but for the spammy stuff above it gives full titles!
When I enable "Highlights" on the new tab page, I see pages I spent a lot of time on lately: e.g. OpenWRT recommended hardware page, Coney Island water temperature page, and a page about the Graphwiz format. None of them are related to anything in Pocket (which I also actively use), or, thank goodness, buzzfeed.
My home page is ~/home.html in all browsers. Thus it's the same in Chrome, FF, w3m, whatever. Much easier than remembering how to set bookmarks/favorites in different browsers and keep them all in sync.
Is that still the case? Did you find an easier option?
[0] Way easier than one would assume, you just need a manifest file next to your HTML file.
EDIT: A local web server instead of loading the HTML file directly also works and avoids the need for add-ons/extensions.
(short version: Mozilla can target you with a small piece of JavaScript to steal your password, then use it offline to decrypt your data)
Do we know if Mozilla is planning anything to fix this?
Nope, so far as I can tell they are invested in their current approach. In fairness, I will admit that it trades security in order to get a slight improvement in usability.
If they'd just make it impossible to log in via JavaScript, and only through the browser UI, then they could increase the security. But they won't do it.
The problem is that this happens in JavaScript which is downloaded from Mozilla's site. It would be trivial for Mozilla to target a single user with a piece of JavaScript which boils down to:
if (username === 'target') { sendPlaintextPassword(); }
It's a really nasty flaw, and the fact that they refuse to address it worries me: why don't they care about the security of their users? Why do they insist on maintaining a backdoor?
did you report this to them? if there was a bug report and they marked it as WONTFIX or something that would give more credence to your theory. otherwise, Hanlon's razor.
Disappointed these are showing up on my Firefox homepage.
I also suppose that this may be the default for a particular audience / geolocation. That is, maybe they'd show a different thing in Russia (sorry, I don't have a Russian VPN), and maybe even a different thing in Texas. Or maybe something based on your previous browsing history (e.g. if you read something like zerohedge a lot, they might show you a different, more aligned site).
I don't know, and am not inclined to thoroughly experiment. But the complete source is there, and it must be a relatively recent addition, so anybody interested could just dive in and find out. Yay Mozilla!
Second, I don't believe the source code of the algorithm that picks which news to show you is available... If there's an algorithm at all, because chances are it's curated by humans.
My recommendations for this are the BBC RSS feed, PBS NewsHour for nightly news / video (Youtube or OTA antenna) and a local paper RSS feed (Chicago Tribune for me). Though that paper has long been considered politically biased (to the right), local events are probably more important than national or worldwide news coverage so one has to bite the bullet at a point.
BBC/Tribune/PBS are simply exceptional reporting, regardless of any leanings, and I'd put that ahead of worrying about a lack of total neutrality. It's a little overblown. It's been clear for some time now that there's a bit of a struggle for right-wingers on being able to mentally muster their way through biased reporting (real or perceived). There's a lot of weak and fragile people around today, can't even watch or read something that doesn't cater to their sensitivities. It used to be that a right-winger aspired to be John Wayne. Now they're all-in on victimhood culture. If they did anything in their life at all, like get off the couch to join the military (which is a government dependent of the worst kind- one that leads to people getting killed, rather than an unpaid, sacrificial service), they're deeply offended if you're not constantly kissing the ring.
Maybe checking just the AP releases would be the best way to get "neutral news", but I think if you just hunt for sources that explicitly do not sensationalize the news, something Fox News brought into popularity, you'll get most of the way there.
Favorite browser modification: set default page to about:blank
I can add any content I want there.
Then if it phones home I have only myself to blame.
You can probably also style about:blank to have whatever you want in it when it loads. I'd imagine that is done differently depending on the browser you're using.
On the other hand, I'm not sure why you'd want to when you can just set your new tab page to a custom page of your choosing.
Edit: clarification
I'm experiencing the retina macbook performance issue, hence I can't use FF + tree style tabs anymore, which was frustrating. Until I recently discovered the Vivaldi Browser (https://vivaldi.com/) which has it as a native option - plus it's built on Chromium. Most Chrome extensions work.
Good setup for me so far!
It has a few irritating quirks, though, and I suppose these quirks have little chance to be removed without some support from browser core.
> “Reopen in Container” tab menu option appears for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container
This is going to make containers even more useful.
[0] Add Alt+C shortcut to open a new tab in current container: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container...
[1] Reopen current tab in container: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-contai...
The built-in minimal and completely manual UI can be enabled with privacy.userContext.enabled = true
I would really love tabgroups to magically start working again, but I have been making due with containers. (and it does have some nice features)
Attention and effort are expensive and 'install and just use' gets you a material percentage more users than 'install and then click through this menu system and install something else'. Containers should absolutely work out the box.
I have a feeling that they are relying on extension developers to add features/functionality.
Solved in Nightly for me!
Not sure on the use of CoreAnimation.
For me, it isn't always in the "Using significant power" list.
To what I know, this issue is known to Moz and will be fixed in a few versions (it appears to be a complex issue that takes time to solve).
"Hey, your laptop is too good, please cripple it!" is not a good answer, especially considering retina displays have been out for 6 years now (and I bet loads of Moz employees use them too).
I use Firefox almost exclusively, and still I wonder, sometimes, what the %$#%@ the "leadership" is thinking. They keep messing with crap like Pocket instead of concentrating on fundamentals like these.
I'm amazed in 2018 it seems tab management (> 20 tabs) is still so awful.
And with each new release, more control is taken from the user, more decent features are removed. I swear, Firefox peaked at 4.0.
(No politics, just the raw browser features. Also, I'm a long time Chrome user, switched to Firefox an year ago, then back to Chrome for a week and now permanently on Firefox.)
Has anyone seen anything like this and maybe even solved it?
I watch a lot of YT content through FF and it has worked fine on both Windows and MacOS / OS X for a long time.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...
TLDR: YouTube uses some obsolete technologies that aren't supported in non webkit browsers.
Not bad, Eh?!
meanwhile, all the security patches you're missing out on: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
at least use ESR 52, which is only 1 release cycle out of date as of today.
Firefox ESR has thousands of open bugs, and possible exploitable flaws. And I don't presume the current tip will be much better. I don't think the fixes you presented make much difference. Also a hacker more probably will attack tip and ESR.
I'll faster go to Palemoon than returning to Firefox in the near future.
Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware?!?!?! And yet Wayland support is still not up to snuff.
I use Firefox almost exclusively, but Mozilla seems to have some strange priorities. It's not just them, it's a lot of people out there doing what they want instead of what's good for their users.
Linux users are about 2.7% of Firefox users
Windows users are 93.2% of Firefox users
27.7% of Windows users don't have Direct2D
That means 25.8% of users "run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware". So it's entirely reasonable to prioritize these 25.8% of users over the 2.7% on Linux.
You're commenting in defense of the original comment, so while you didn't explicitly complain about it, you implicitly supported the complaint.
Almost certainly a very small number.
Two words: Remote Desktop.