Firefox 64 Released
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
Yessss. It doesn't happen often, but the times when I open up 6-10 tabs for research but then decide they deserve their own window so I can focus on them (and subsequently drag them out one by one) is still a lot.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
It has the advantage that it just saves to a special spot in bookmarks, so these sessions sync across devices too:
open source too: https://github.com/ReDEnergy/SessionSync
That and the keep-consuming-all-memory-until-all-memory-is-consumed switch, and the killing of GCLI (see: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/77a57160cf470136d1540218b70db...) which makes restarting FF far more fraught. Quite honestly, a "force quit" seems to be the most effective approach.
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2018-July/006...
I used to use the multiple tabs handler addon but it stopped working once I moved to 60esr so I was glad that they introduced it back.
0 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-...
There's still a five year old bug where firefox thinks the window has the last size from the previous session when you restart it and save open tabs, when using a tiling window manager, but it fixes itself when you manually resize it, I can learn to live with this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups
full disclosure: I'm the maintainer for Panorama Tab Groups right now so I am slightly biased. I do think photodiode and the guys in charge of Panorama View are way better than I am at this, but since they're not active right now, I've created a fork so I can have a more up to date add-on
Super happy right now.
If you'd like to use KDE file selectors in a non-DE setup, you'll need to get `xdg-desktop-portal-kde` working.
To test it once you could execute:
GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 firefox
If you want a more persistent solution you could add
export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1
to your .profile or /etc/profile (if you want it for all system users)
Disclaimer: I am a Linux user since >20 years, using XMonad window manager on Ubuntu 16.04 at the moment.
> Easier performance management: The new Task Manager page found at about:performance lets you see how much energy each open tab consumes and provides access to close tabs to conserve power
> Improved performance for Mac and Linux users, by enabling link time optimization (Clang LTO). (Clang LTO was enabled for Windows users in Firefox 63.)
Release Notes: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/
This is pretty neat, now I'm wondering why the webex extension is having "Medium" impact when it should be doing nothing.
At least it's not Google Hangouts. That crap platform will kill any laptop battery in ~30-45 min flat and make it seem like you're rendering some 8K video.
Does this mean I need to build it myself or is the binary gonna ship this way?
I would like these features to be standardised to hands-off-my-fricking-scrollbars.
I’m fed up with impossible-to-grab 1px-wide scrollbars because “everyone has trackpads”. No, they don’t.
A browser-wide scrollbar styling system, able to be opted into by use of particular CSS, doesn’t imply anything about whether we are talking about just one scroll bar or all of them.
I also disagree about native controls not always being the best solution when it comes to scrolling. We all know how annoying it is when a page jacks scrolling; it’s a usability nightmare that makes pages’ scroll behaviour harder to predict. We don’t need to add to the usability issues by letting one of the most fundamental pieces of chrome in a web browser get jacked even further than the already impermissible state.
Don't most mice have scrolling as well? It's not about trackpads.
Long story short, stop fscking with accessibility. If your js code or libraries handles ANY input events, you'd better watch yourself because you're venturing into specialized-interface-by-and-for-assholes-land.
Imagine you cmd + F a phrase and there are 200 responses separated into like 4 chunks of a document. It can be useful to scroll to the start of each chunk to get the context of them.
I realize the benefits of the Overlay Scroll Bar to the majority of users who have scroll-wheels. But it sure would be nice if there was an easy way to revert back to the Normal Scroll Bar ("Classic" scroll bar?). You know, the wide bar that scrolls down exactly one page-length if you click outside of the bar? I've spent plenty of time Googling and in "about:config" and exporting environment variables like GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0 to no avail.
But not all.
One thing I like about the Firefox (Gtk?) scrollbar is that it finally removed (a few version ago already) the "Click on it somewhere, but it doesn't move there but just acts like PgDown/Up", i.e. the non-warping to the exact click position but just inching towards it. This is completely unnecessary in the time of wheels and touchpads and I already miss it everywhere else.
It is completely necessary for me to have “move one page up on click.”
Definitely no: If I have a hand on the mouse I surely don't want to lift it and hunt for the PgUp or PgDown just to move one page up or down. And no, I don't want to go "there" if it's actually "somewhere" in the middle of whatever, if I just want to see the previous or the next page. Going "there" is much less frequent operation than moving to the next or the previous page.
"Most"? Where did you get that idea? "Most gaming mice" or what? Most of the users aren't gamers.
> that means a PgDown button (I guess it is mostly that direction) on the mouse is missing.
Of course is missing: "normal" (as in the most common) mice have only 2 buttons and the scroll wheel.
The scroll wheel never moves one page up (or down), but just some small number of lines, so the most common operation is then impossible for the most of the users just because a developer (who probably even "lives" in his terminal for most of the time, never lifting the both hands from the middle of the keyboard) thinks that everybody has exactly the gear that he has.
- left click - page up/down
- middle click - go directly to this point.
Moving one of these to the other is confusing and a loss of useful functionality. Reminds me of "chesterton's fence."
For most longer texts, I hate "click to here" on the scrollbars. It's impossible to get it right. Them working as pgup/down makes much more sense.
A handful of people love it, most think it's a bug. It's particularly bad if you're using a trackpad.
I would theorize that it's not a well known complaint because most people move on quickly and just assume their computer is buggy.
If you're uncomfortable with the user realizing the game is a browser game, why did you make it in a browser?
Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern.
Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should.
> When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become familiar with elements acting in a certain way, so choosing to adopt those elements when appropriate will help with task completion, efficiency, and satisfaction.
[1] https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/user-inte...
Sadly the world has gone the other way and basically ditched the whole concept of native widgets and consistent look and feel.
> Does this principal apply to X for y?
In a vacuum, yes it's a principal.
In reality, while it's an antipattern it doesn't mean you should be afraid let alone disallowed the ability to exercise good judgement and make a call.
Full window, emersive games are the perfect example of UI elements like buttons that should probably be reskinned - wisely. I say wisely because you can still reskin buttons in a way that affords familiarity you can also reskin them in a way that makes them abhorrent.
A converse example is windows based skinnable hardware interface software like MSI afterburner and the like. That sort of thing is absolute unthought, untested garbage.
For website buttons I think the ship has sailed and the default elements actually look alien.
In fact a lot of CSS frameworks improve net usability from defaults anyway.
Now, is it an antipattern to use them? In essence yes, but considering everything no. Caution, many css frameworks have UX issues and you need to make a judgement in your evaluation about which features to use. I like to see how their autocomplete / dropdown features work it's usually a good litmus test because those things are basically impossible to do right.
And this why we have UX people.
It is the marriage and trade off of usability/hci and designers to create a usability experience that delights.
Though things still tend to lean toward design first approaches. Which aren't incorrect approaches but do tend to lack emphasis on circling back to fix usability later.
I think website internals are widely debatable but do have norms you must consider.
I draw the line at breaking out of the window sandbox and altering browser UI. It assumes all browsers work the same and creates a dependency on the browser for a shared experience.
An inconsequential example: setting browser ui color on mobile version of Chrome. Now your whole website design feels very native and is reasoned about with that native feel. That can them lead to inconsistent design assumptions being made on the desktop. Maybe your color selection clashes badly with the desktop grey.
Like I said, inconsequential, but might illustrate why messing with it might be a bad idea.
The other big reason I throw down at the browser window line is accessibility. Messing with things like button sizing / scrollbar sizing and things wrecks absolute havoc on these users. They also make English centric assumptions about designs that are almost always wrong eventually.
Castle of the Winds, Windows 3.11.
I remember having a lot of fun playing Stars! as a child: https://www.mobygames.com/game/stars
The work around was to use JavaScript, just to make it work on Firefox.
It can now be implemented in CSS, which makes it really easy for you to disable or change your preference as well putting the responsibility of style on CSS and not some annoying JavaScript.
I really, REALLY hate that they're killing this feature, but this addon promises to restore it: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/30/livemarks-restores-live-bo...
Edit: here's the official GitHub: https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/
Mozilla did the same with tab groups, then the addon was abandoned. The replacement that is compatible with the new form of extension isn't able to unload the tabs, just hide them, which undoes most of the performance benefits.
[abraham simpson voice] It'll happen to you too! [/abraham simpson voice] /jk
Wouldn't that indicate that the extension was not that widely used, and as such Mozilla were correct in removing it from the central codebase?
At Mozzila they need to prioritize many different things and I can understand how a constant push to make the browser leaner is foundamental. (especially in cases like RSS feeds)
I don't think most people even knew it was there.
I can't imagine Mozilla crippling the addon API to the point where it can't grab data off an RSS feed and display it.
I don't buy that. It's my browser running on my computer, it's my choice whose code I choose to run on it.
If, say, emacs or vi had this kind of handholding, neither one would be much more than a text editor.
I believe this information is out of date. Firefox 58 brought extension developers the ability to unload tabs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322485
And Totally Not Panorama takes advantage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/basic-panoram...
I wish tab handling had a first-class API in Firefox, so that different tab managers could interact with the default tab menu, etc.
Firefox 64 introduces an entirely new API, browser.menus.overrideContext, which allows complete customization of the context menu shown within add-on content like sidebars, popups, etc.
This is illustrated right in the post by my favorite pain point, the Tree Stye Tab custom tab menu mixing with the regular tab menu.
Finally!
Yes, but I don't really want tree-styled tabs, I want tab groups :P The interface is vastly different.
.. now if only Google had used that to notice the things I like about Inbox and keep them :-(
Maybe they are also in the wrong if the telemetry is excessive, but the alternative is to never deprecate any feature ever.
Better than keep removing features and reasons to use Firefox from some of their loyalest users, even if they are a minority. User retention seems Mozilla's largest issue at the moment now they're down under 10%.
Also, 0.01% of a big number is still a big number, and given the state of the feature, that number is likely to include a lot of long-time users.
When resources are constrained you have to make decisions about what features you'll continue to develop and which to cut out. Live bookmarks was cut out. Mozilla devs have also mentioned that this feature is ancient code and would have required a lot of coding effort to bring up to date.
I'm sure if you were to invest the time to reimplement live bookmarks with modern code and with the internal restructuring in the browser in mind and you'd volunteer to maintain it and fix all filed bugs, they'd accept it.
They removed the visibility years ago, then progressive updates made them ever less visible, including hiding then removing RSS notification. Once the first step was taken, the route to removal was set, including the telemetry figures.
If they were as visible as pocket, perhaps as visible as pocket stories on new tabs, usage would be hugely higher.
https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/issues/17
Still, this update felt particularly user hostile. My user experience was:
- I'm in the middle of browsing and open a tab to do a search, but the new tab shows the "Firefox needs to restart because updates are more important than you!“ page.
- I'm forced to restart. Manually, since the automatic restart is probably broken on my system. Tab state in some SPA tabs are lost.
- Now I have to migrate my live bookmarks. They converted themselves to regular bookmarks- I have to right click and delete those one by one. Then I install Livemarks, import the exported bookmarks data, and then drag those one by one to my bookmarks toolbar.
I'm half considering Chrome. If Firefox is going to be like this, why bother? Might as well start the Chrome dominance and stagnation part of the browser cycle.
From the linked-to-post, it lacks:
* Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.)
* CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip)
* Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky).
* Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.)
* Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.)
* Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser)
* xdotool
Lack of Wayland versions of these apps is a deal breakers for me, and I'm going to avoid Wayland until it gets them.
[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...
Why do we need Wayland?
Also, when I run X just for myself on my own laptop, what security issues do I have to worry about with X that I don't have to worry about with Wayland?
With regards to security, the main issue is that X11 provides no isolation between applications, allowing them to listen to keystrokes and the clipboard at all times. With Wayland, only focused applications have this access.
Currently I'm using an old, slow laptop, with a graphics card integrated in to the motherboard. Nothing special. But I don't do any demanding graphics processing on it. I just watch movies and use web browsers and a terminal. I don't play graphically intense games on it.
"With regards to security, the main issue is that X11 provides no isolation between applications, allowing them to listen to keystrokes and the"
I don't see why this should concern me or 90% of X users, because if any malware manages to run on our systems it'll already have full control over them without needing to resort to any kind of keystroke sniffing in X.
I'm struggling to think of a scenario where malware's running on the same machine with access to a single X session, which doesn't already have full control over the account whose keystrokes they'd be presumably sniffing. They could just substitute their own malware versions of web browsers, shells, editors, or whatever other software the user uses and sniff keystrokes in there, without needing to touch X.
Not that it hurts to have more isolation than you get in X, but I'd need a lot more convincing for me to give up the convenience I already enjoy with X.
Can someone paint me a realistic, relatively common threat scenario where not having Wayland's isolation would actually present a serious security risk?
A compromised web browser doesn't need X to control the rest of your system. It can usually already write all over your system and perform all sorts of other attacks, including substituting applications, paths, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.. not to mention try kernel exploits and the like -- not that they'd need to on a single-user system, as they could just get your sudo password by one of the other means mentioned above, all without touching X.
Anyway, if a typical user's browser is compromised, they're already completely screwed, as they typically access their online banking and webmail through it. Once again, the attacker does not need to touch X to get access to any of that.
To me it still sounds like Wayland's security model is trying to solve a niche problem that most X users don't really suffer from -- and charging an arm and a leg for it.
Not necessarily. Properly sandboxed applications like Chromium have a seccomp filter, separate pid/user/etc namespaces and bind mounts setup to isolate themselves from the rest of the system as much as possible.
> Anyway, if a typical user's browser is compromised, they're already completely screwed
It really depends on which part of the browser is compromised. Again, Chromium has some pretty good isolation. Having one malicious website exploit a vulnerability does not necessarily mean the attacker gets access to any of the other browser data.
For instance, only the currently focused tab should have access to the X clipboard.
This is a bit naive. Browsers execute malicious javascript on your system all the time. A V8 sandbox escape is worth retirement money for a reason.
Wayland makes lots of things possible: multi-monitor HiDPI, touchpad gestures like pinch to zoom (just like Macs could do ages ago), touchscreen support that's actually independent of the mouse pointer instead of always dragging it along… and there's finally no goddamn screen tearing. Every frame is perfect™.
Might be true, never happened to me. But what about FPS in Games. X11 beats it there for me. Or what about in the most important metric of them all: Latency. In all my Tests Latncy on Wayland is always a regression, compared to X11. (I use Intel and HDxxxx era AMD Graphics, can not say anything about Nvidia)
> Wayland makes lots of things possible
That might be true. But X11 can be extended and has been extended very often (hence the messy code). One thing I need regularly, namely OpenGL pass-through via SSH, will never be possible with Wayland.
> Every frame is perfect™
To me far less important than latency. Wayland should only care about tearing when I play full screen games. When I type on the terminal I want my characters appear instantly, then I don't care about tearing at all.
On my own testing (GNOME, latest Kernel, as well as Sway temporarily) latency and FPS were better on Wayland than X11 (though only on my beefier graphics card, windows rendered on the second one had higher latency and comparatively lower FPS than expected. But I don't game on that card.
>One thing I need regularly, namely OpenGL pass-through via SSH, will never be possible with Wayland.
Correct because Wayland isn't a network-like protocol as X is (though I've had X network passthrough break or fill up a gigabit ethernet connection worth of bandwidth on more than one occasion).
If you want remote desktop on Wayland, you need a tool specifically designed for that.
It's the unix mindset after all; why have one tool (X) do everything when you can have lots of tools interact and each solves it's own little problems (Wayland + tools)?
>Wayland should only care about tearing when I play full screen games.
If you run a game on wayland you usually get control over the screen anyway when you go fullscreen, once you have exclusive control you can go tearing all you want.
Though with adaptive sync becoming more common (and already being common on laptops) the perfect frame is less costly than tearing; the display will run at the FPS you can manage (within bounds). For it to work you only need to VSync and the GPU driver handles the rest.
In my experience, Wayland has way better and smoother performance than X on adaptive sync displays.
Every frame is great. If a frame is missing, ### gets quite irate.
With Gnome et al you are most certainly in high latency hell on X11.
* Programmatic output configuration
swaymsg -t get_outputs # get displays
swaymsg output DP-1 pos 0 0 res 1920x1080 # set displays
* CLI clipboard access
swaymsg -t get_clipboard
* Third party app launcher/window switcher
I use gnome-panel with Xwayland, but better than nothing
* Third party screen shot/capture/share
https://github.com/foss-project/green-recorder
* Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser)
Sorry, no options here yet, but it can be done
* xdotool
swaymsg [title="Top Panel"] floating enable, resize set width 2560 px height 32 px, move position 0 -38
Window managers can implement their own extra protocols of course, but instead of X11 where everything was standardized and window managers didn't even have to think about it, there is no standard and window managers have to rewrite all the code for it themselves.
It's not an "issue". It's a design decision.
As another example, Linux doesn't have just one desktop environment, like Windows or MacOS, would you say that's an "issue", even if it's a deliberate decision?
"GNOME and KDE have dbus APIs for some (but not all) of these things, and sway has its own IPC, and other compositors probably have similar solutions. However, they all use different mechanisms, which means that if you are writing say, screenshot application you either have to write a different backend for every compositor, or choose just one or two to support.
"Something all of these types of applications have in common is they need to be able to inspect and/or modify state from other applications or the compositor itself. Which wayland's security model normally prevents. I think a major gap in wayland, is having a way for an application to run with escalated permissions so it can have access to other applications. Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas on what that would look like."
and then, later in the thread:
"for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region."
The entire thread linked to above is worth reading.
My own takeaway is that Wayland is just way too immature to compete with X for my power-user use cases.
It might be ok for users with simple needs.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1512416 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509740
For those using Firefox, I have one question. Is there any way to replicate Chrome's tab-to-search feature? It's literally the ONLY reason I'm still on Chrome.
Let me explain by showing how I would search for "apples" in youtube across both browsers.
Firefox:
1 - Ctrl+L (go to location bar) 2 - Type "you", press "down" to select youtube from history. 3 - Wait for site to load...... 4 - Click on search box 5 - Type in "apples" 6 - Press enter
Chrome:
1 - Ctrl+L (go to location bar) 2 - Type "you", and if youtube is first item in history, 3 - Press "tab" 4 - Type in "apples" 5 - Press enter.
Youtube opens up with my searched item. Nice and easy with far fewer key presses no waiting nor mouse clicking.
Works for youtube, hacker news, wiktionary, google images, and a heap of other sites I use daily.
I am using firefox with duckduckgo.
Firefox + DDG = Ctrl+L - Type "!yt apples", press enter
That being said, there are a few alternatives. Firefox Top Sites supports search engines, as described in https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/save-a-search-step/. Additionally, if you use DuckDuckGo as your default, you can use bang patterns, which I prefer as they are curated.
Maybe there's an extension that does the Chrome thing, but I searched in the past and didn't find one.
[1] open youtube.com
[2] right click on the search bar and select "Add a keyword for this search"
[3] in the dialog enter the character "y" as the keyword.
[4] done!
now to search youtube from the address bar just enter y followed by the search terms!
Firefox requires the user to add the search engine manually: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
Firefox uses it to populate the search bar drop down menu with the available search engines for a site, but it does not add them automatically like Chrome does.
location: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s keyword: g
example search 'g test query'
Go to youtube.
Right click on the youtube search bar.
add a keyword for this search.
choose your keyword (ex: yt)
now you can type in the omnibar "yt my search" and it will do directly the search. It's not as good as chrome solution but it's the only thing for now.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
This'll actually make a measurable difference to me on a daily basis with how much I search youtube for study at the moment. Thanks.
1. Got to the Bookmark Library and Right Click > New Bookmark and fill it as follows: Name: YouTube Search Location: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s Keyword: you
2. Click Add
3. Now in the Location bar type "you apples" and apples will be searched on YouTube.
I use this for a lot of sites with search inputs. I often do searches using ddg of sites I visit with forums or other buried content. Any search that has a URL that you can input a set of terms into can be used. Just use %s in the location for where the terms are in the URL.
Example using DDG to search CarForum.com:https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3CarForum.com+%s&t=ffab&ia=we...
This does the query "site:CarForum.com %s" on DDG.
To search for "apples" on Youtube, press Ctrl-E to focus on the search bar, type "apples", click on the Youtube icon or press Ctrl-down/up arrow to choose Youtube, then enter.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?type=search
Also - too many actions in your example vs. very simple and effective tab-to-search or keyword search available in Firefox.
1 - Ctrl+L (go to location bar)
2 - Type "yt! apples"
3 - There is not step 3.
then choose "Add Search Engine"
// 'Dispatches' doesn't make sense to users, and it's difficult to present
// two numbers in a meaningful way, so we need to somehow aggregate the
// dispatches and duration values we have.
// The current formula to aggregate the numbers assumes that the cost of
// a dispatch is equivalent to 1ms of CPU time.
// Dividing the result by the sampling interval and by 10 gives a number that
// looks like a familiar percentage to users, as fullying using one core will
// result in a number close to 100.
let energyImpact =
Math.max(duration || 0, dispatches * 1000) / UPDATE_INTERVAL_MS / 10;
// Keep only 2 digits after the decimal point.It reminds me of old platform video games before Super Mario Bros. (and for a while after) Superficially, they looked and played kind of the same, but there were a thousand little tweaks in how Mario handled that made it feel right.
I'm definitely going to give Firefox a spin and see how it handles these days.
Other places that could use some revamp are manage bookmarks dialog.
I don't mind the different styled settings or menu items at all. The balance (or lack thereof) between font-sizes/font-weights, line weights, the darker gray lines etc. is what perturbs me. Maybe they should look at making the UI look a little 'lighter', like Safari and Chrome.
I have several userChrome CSS changes to make it look exactly as I want. All these taming took me some time, but it's totally worth it because this is a software you spend a few hours every day on.
I have a local html page devoted to news. An entry for a specific site will see at least two urls: The main site's URL and a link to it's RSS feed.
Linking to the feed directly was a great way to bypass all the modern garbage on the home page to see a simple list of articles (not unlike HN's home page). It's borked now...
None of my RSS links render. Chromium was very bad at this but at least it rendered a few (a couple of examples below), FF64 doesn't render any (in any form):
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
https://feeds.feedburner.com/ItsFoss
A huge part of my ability to enjoy the web has just been destroyed.:( I'll have to test this on other browsers...
edit (update): both sample links above are working now (odd). Most others with XML, RSS, Atom extensions do not render (FF offers to open in external app or save).
http://andregarzia.com/2018/11/reading-blogs-with-thunderbir...
Since Thunderbird is also my email client, it becomes a very pleasant experience of catching my email, my newsletters and my blogs in the same client.
I actually use The Old Reader[0] for most tech sites (including hnFrontPage and showHN). There are other sites that I'm only partially interested in or they have so much content, I don't want them in my Reader.
When I have time, I'll access the Feed Link and give the stories a bird's eye view. Also, some of these home pages are a nightmare in the Times Square sense of the word.
The Old Reader also keeps the the Feed Link accessible. Sometimes I'll hit the [mark all as read] but later on, I might go back and look at the day's listings for a particular site. I'm surprised how often I do this for some sites (mostly to reread an article or follow up on a comment I made). That flexibility is lost now.
Also, I don't subscribe to general news sites. The amount of articles would be overwhelming. News sites with RSS Feed Links make them manageable. I've essentially lost this - so I'll either have to access their obnoxious home pages (with anti-trackers fully loaded) or find other means.
I used to go local on my feeds... and while I avoid the cloud for most things, feed listings feel very natural there (also they don't take up local storage).
It's workable but I'm a bit annoyed that an application built on rendering (simple) tags (rq'd little/zero work to maintain) decides that things associated with RSS are going to be killed off (maybe??... in favor of their own news sources - which require much more work to maintain).
Recently switched to Miniflux: https://miniflux.app which is much better for my needs. Small efficient Go app that works great with a PWA on mobile.
I've tried to find an extension for FF that does this, but so far I was unable to find one.
1. rebuild the UI from scratch
2. rebuild basic tab handling behaviour from scratch
3. build tab stacking on top of that
4. (ideally) hide Firefox's existing tab bar
And there's two issues with the above steps:
(a) 4 hasn't been possible with the new extensions API sofar (it was in progress last I checked, maybe it's possible now)
(b) the dev effort required is big, so results have not been very polished sofar
they're getting there though
On the other hand, if you want to try something resembling that as-yet-unsurpassed 2010 UI today, Vivaldi is working on replicating it natively.
I'm never keen to recommend Vivaldi because it's (a) closed source, which is why we don't have Opera anymore and (b) it's Blink, and we need diversity there. But it's a very good browser otherwise.
An extension exists NOW that people enjoy using. Building THIS into firefox isn't a replacement for a robust extension interface unless you suppose that first party developers can think or implement all the good ideas that will ever come about.
People in truth give zero damns if its easier to implement or more elegantly done any more than they care if their tv is beautifully engineered because their priorities aren't yours. They care about functionality. Right now firefox seems to be lighter and even post quantum have better extensions. Throwing either of those out will cause it to cede more marketshare to chrome.
Er, no. What I think is that becoming a "first-party developer"—when you already know as much about the internals of Firefox as is required to maintain an extension such as TST—isn't that hard. Firefox is a FOSS project, with internals that are well-maintained and well-documented, and the UI layer is abstracted out to make working with it easier for frontend engineers (which is why, unlike any other browser, you constantly see versions of Firefox with new "experimental UIs.")
> There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points.
I mean, that was my argument, yes. And I don't see how it misses the point, because I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a Firefox user, nor am I coming at this from the perspective of one of the existing TST maintainers. I have no dog in the fight of Firefox's extension system, because—at the earliest point I'd even start using Firefox—it'd already be a “fact of life” that it only has WebExtensions. I'd just have to take it as a given that you can't do what TST does (did) as an extension, and ask the question afresh: how do you implement something like TST?
And the answer is: natively, in the browser chrome, and thankfully so, because that's what TST should have done in the first place and it'll make many parts of the implementation a lot easier. (See my sibling reply.)
Though, also, never mind Firefox. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a developer who would want to implement TST-like functionality for any FOSS browser. For example, TST-like functionality for Chromium.
The fact that TST already exists for "old Firefox" doesn't really matter. That's a different web-browser than the one we've got now, and no current browser lets you do what TST did at the extension level. I don't care about ideological arguments about whether they should let you; I care about the practical facts of how to go about having TST functionality in the present/future of the browser landscape.
For an example I've experienced personally: LinkedIn provides a data API... for a price. There are entire companies, however, that scrape LinkedIn's data instead of paying that price, and then try to work with the scraped data (which has been "baked down" through all sorts of views, localization, projections, etc.) as if it was the API data.
How much more code do you think such a scraper consists of, compared to an API client?
(The LinkedIn case is even worse because LinkedIn has stateful firewalls that actively thwart scraping, and these scrapers have to have code to trick the firewall, as well.)
There are some features that are rightly being removed from core in favour of being served by an extension (Container Tabs is a great example—one of my favourite and most-used features personally, but I prefer it in an extension for a few reasons). Better tab management is the opposite: this is something Firefox should work on getting right out of the box.
I get that unless/until it makes it into core, we need good, working, popular extensions to bridge the gap, and perhaps to convince core devs there's an audience, but that's no reason to stop asking for it.
Would also recommend people trial Vivaldi, or even Opera 12 (probably still downloadable from somewhere out there) to try out the general UI concept.
https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I think it would solve the GP comment's problem better too. There's not so much need to use multiple windows if you can just use multiple trees in the same window.
As a bonus there are many plugins for the plugin (!) such as one that lets you use the mouse wheel on it to switch tabs. [1] This is more useful in the tab tree than the normal tab strip, especially since it skips over tabs hidden in collapsed subtrees.
All that stuff about browser engine competition is great but TST is the real reason to use Firefox rather than Chrome.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Even if you do want a new window - drag the common parent tab to a new window and it takes its children along for the ride.
While I love the tool, it definitely has some rough edges with integration.
It has the same problem Firefox Multi-Account Containers has: Trying to change internal UI for an internal feature by using an addon simply isn't practical (yet).
First Chrome forced it on, because EvilCorp's business model is around a forced-open-eyelid philosophy of advertising revenue from unstoppable impressions.
Next I moved to Firefox, which in an update a few months ago changed the autoplay option to be on, removed the config attribute and made it a new one, which has as options 0, 1 and 2. Turned out autoplay default should be 1.
I'm not about to wait to find out what's around the corner. I started using Vivaldi this weekend in hopes someone actually made a browser for those who don't care about some company's ad revenue.
I don't know why Firefox would do that, and introduce Pocket as well. Is copying Google that sexy a thing?
I don't understand what you mean here. Without having changed any of the settings from the default, Firefox (Nightly) pops up to ask me if I want to "allow auto-playing media with sound" the first time each website tries to do it. If I say no, the media doesn't auto-play.
if 0, then it's on.
if 1, then it's off.
2, I'm not sure.
pref("media.autoplay.default", 2); // 0=Allowed, 1=Blocked, 2=Prompt
Turned out to be wrong, thats why we will be shipping blocked by default
btw: Love Firefox, thanks for working on it =).
(There's actually a wealth of stuff in this preference tab: you can set defaults and per-site overrides for content blockers, page zoom levels, camera and microphone, defaulting to "Reader View" for particularly annoying sites, and so on.)
It's a binary plist, but you can view the content using:
plutil -p ~/Library/Safari/SitesAllowedToAutoplay.plistPresumably they publish meeting minutes where such decisions are made?
>"Back in 2014, the last year of the Google deal, that agreement brought in $323 million of the foundation’s $330 million in total revenue."
They had deal with Yahoo for similar money, and walked from that to go to Google again.
For financials I can find they got all but 2% of their money from Google.
Presumably for this money Google gets to call some shots like no default blocking off their ads, and, I'd imagine autoplay as default if that's important to Google.
I'd expect a supposedly open foundation like Mozilla to publish details of major decisions. You're not open without transparency.
Ad firms are probably paying Mozilla to include it.
Original plan was to ask the user by default. We did some user testing with this change and it looks like we will be changing it to block by default based on feedback
Not sure what this has to do with any companies ad revenue, or pocket
It's one thing to discriminate against certain sites in Search, where Google owns the webpages and servers. But to discriminate against the open web so that their services have an advantage over startups and smaller publishers is beyond unethical. At this point they're starting to act like a monopolistic ISP and should be called out for it.
I already had to deal w/ increased complaints from users due to scripts no longer being able to start the video in Chrome when the user hasn't interacted with the DOM yet. The only warning was an error in the development console. Users would get incredibly confused because they'd join the room and "lurk", i.e not interact w/ chat or the site, and then they'd be left wondering why everyone is commenting on the video when their's hasn't started playing.
I realize autoplay gets a lot of flak due to large corporations using it to further their aggressive marketing campaigns, but there are legitimate use cases out there which you will be breaking w/ a block-by-default policy. I'd urge you to reconsider ask-by-default, or at least allow scripts to have some sort of API whereby they can ask the user for permission ahead of time.
This just really sucks, because it's hard to communicate these sorts of things to my userbase which has wildly varying degrees of technical competency. It's also unfortunate to, essentially, need relay the message "some organizations (ab|mis)used this useragent functionality, so now nobody gets to use it."
"Click here to play video" is also clear and easy to understand, not sure why you would think your users could not handle that.
In future https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Permissions... may help
I was one of those users, as I have Nightly installed. I hope you don't seriously think me clicking "no" on the majority of those popups in any way equates to me saying "videos should never autoplay." -- Hell I used my own service and approved one of those dialogs for it.
You should be careful how you read into statistics: there is a huge difference between "90+% of users said no to the autoplay prompt" and "90+% of users think autoplay should be off by default."
>Not sure why you would think your users could not handle that.
I don't think, I know, because I've fielded the numerous reports from users who thought my service was broken when Google[1] decided their "media engagement index" was too low and the videos weren't starting automatically for them.
It is objectively a bad experience for my users if they all have to manually click play and their streams are randomly offset from the host and they see people "spoiling" things in chat. The reality is that many of my users would sit on the page, looking at a play button (that wasn't there before), wondering why people are already talking about the video in chat. "Has it started yet?" "When does it start?" "I think I'm buffering", etc.
[1]: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...
So why stop at a pop-up for AutoPlay video?
"The website has requested permission to have autoplay video. Grant (Y/N)"
but also
" " " " .. requested permission to display notifications.."
Why stop there?
" .. requested permission to autoplay media with sound .."
and why not
" .. requested permission to set/store cookies "
Finally, after a drum roll:
"Sign up to this mailing list!" - unblockable JavaScript popup when you're a third down the article.
How many bloody popups would satisfy every single website publisher? Turn all the damn things off, let the designers figure out if they want to point a big giant arrow GIF to where the "Click Here" button to play the video is.
At least with the webcam/microphone/notification APIs the average user has a chance at understanding what's going on, they are not being given the same choice here, and that's what I take issue with. Believe me I get it: every week there's some site that makes me go "what on earth do they need push notifications for?" -- I'm still happy to make that choice, though.
If this is about giving the user's more control over what they see: then the setting should not be hidden in about:config, full stop. I know this may be lost on the HN crowd, but doing that relegates the functionality to a small fraction of power-users.
You know what, I think we agree! That's two votes for "move some stuff out of top-secret about:config and into Settings where the mortals can actually use it, it's useful for them."
Not just because of that, although that is the most egregious example. Personally, I find any autoplay at all to be objectionable. It doesn't matter if it's an ad, a YouTube video, or anything else.
If useragents remove my ability to start playing content on behalf of my users (who have already agreed to that by clicking past the event banner) then my service will have to move to a non-web platform. Though we have a difference of opinion hopefully you can see why I find that prospect to be distressing: I love the web, and I hate to see it effectively sunsetting my application.
Hold on -- do you want a popup every time you visit a new page? It's a nightmare. And break what for whom? You want something to play, you click the Play icon on the video. It doesn't BLOCK video by default, it blocks the autoplaying of the same.
Also - and perhaps this was some bug or some setting I had - but when I updated to 'that' Firefox some months back, I'm pretty sure I had autoplay playING things. I had previously used about:config to have autoplay off, and then they changed it (as per the 0 1 2 and property name change). Possibly I hit enter too fast, possibly I didn't notice and just got annoyed at the popups asking me, whatever it was, I wanted it just "off" and I had to Google around until I found comment in some forum someplace which has this option. The point is, instead of being an "about:config" option, it should be an obvious setting in the Menu -> Options section.
I'm amazed that someone thinks not forcing things is somehow "breaking" things. If it's the type of breaking you mean (breaking ad-tech), then yes, let's continue the smashathon. Autoplay video, whether on a news site or some yapping garbage on the side as an ad, is a terrible trend for us who don't like such distractions.
My users explicitly do not want that, it's why I built my service, to answer a need which was not met: the lack of a virtual space to have a shared theater-like experience. They want the video to play when it starts for everyone else in the room, and they were extremely confused a few months ago when Google broke the same thing.
For example, when user clicks text link on page that opens a lightbox (such as fancybox) containing an embedded video. I (and the user) would want the video to begin playing immediately upon opening the lightbox. But it sounds ilke the user will now need to additionally press play on the embedded video? Anyone know?
I really hope this is not the case. I'm hoping the clicking of the initial text link that opens lightbox is enough to authorize video playback with sound on all devices.
Every new release reminds me of this comic: http://www.stickycomics.com/computer-update/
As a tweet I read today[1] :
"Mozilla seems to be under the assumption that there are people out there who don't want them to win.
EVERYONE WANTS MOZILLA TO WIN!
Half the developers on the Chrome team want Mozilla to win.
We're all sort of terrified that Mozilla isn't going to win"
I'm glad there are more people embracing this attitude within Mozilla and the developer community.
You wouldn't say that the new train carriage, which only works on the Bosnian gauge and not on the Standard gauge (EU, US) "makes the experience better and better" even if they have free wi-fi, air-conditioning, plenty of feet space, leather seats, panoramic sunroof etc. You can't even use it, so all the extras are useless.
I took Chromium, found the perfect plugins, and never looked back at Mozilla, after 10+ years of using it. If it's broken, you can't use it, even if it's fast.
The new versions of Firefox have almost the same plugin interface as Chromium. If you're satisfied with it, then why aren't you satisfied with it?
See what fellytone84 had to say about keysnail, here on HN, 4 years ago [2]: I consider Mooz's Keysnail Firefox add-on to be the most impressive keyboard oriented browsing tool. It's endlessly configurable, dotfiles in javascript--really nice to work with. For Chrome, the Vimium extension is very good, but recently I've been having a lot of fun with a similar, more configurable alternative called chromium-vim.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojh...
So while I do miss the old extensions, and disagree strongly with how they went about it, any particular thing that's available only on chrome isn't really because chrome is better. With a little push cVim could support both browsers.
There's also a menagerie of Vimperator alikes for Firefox: Tridactyl, Vim Vixen, Surfingkeys, Vimium-FF, VVVimpulation. Most of them have improved substantially since September 2017.
Disclaimer: lots of Tridactyl's jank is my fault.
Apparently support for doing gestures correctly would "break the security model" and the code would be rejected, so I'm going to disagree there.
There are some details that you will only notice if you have used FF and chrome in equal amounts for a long time, such as being able to easily merge two windows in Chrome (in one click vs two), or clumsy bookmarks and search history settings in FF, etc.
Also there's a significantly slower drop-down url menu in firefox?? How does no one notice this? I click on a result and a list of other results take its place and send me to the wrong page, before the change even appears in the url box.
There will be people who ask me to elaborate on my points here, but I'm so tired of doing that for Firefox supporters and curious chrome users. If you want to feel why Chrome is simply better, just use it and compare it to Firefox.
As long as both browsers are able to do everything, a good UI is the only deciding factor for me. So many people in this thread are echoing what I've said.
I have stopped using chrome and now am using Opera as the secondary browser with tightened setting.
Firefox's Awesome Bar (location bar) is superior to Chrome's Omnibar. And this matters too when it comes to bookmarks, which are automatically searched. But when typing in your location bar, you can also limit the searches just to your bookmarks by starting the search with a "*" char. You can also use "^" to limit your searches just to your history.
You don't usually need such refinement, the Awesome Bar simply does a good job by default, but given that it searches in multiple places, sometimes precision helps. See here for this trick: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
Speaking of bookmark management, Firefox also has this neat feature: "Bookmark All Tabs". You specify a folder and it saves all of your opened tabs.
Overall I feel that Firefox has the upperhand on bookmark management. Not sure why you feel it is clumsy.
---
I've used Chrome for two years and still use it from time to time, for testing purposes and because I want to see how it evolves.
That said, as a Firefox supporter, I think Firefox is superior for my usage patterns. And about its UI, believe it or not, but it was its UI that made me stick with Firefox. And I'm a Mac OS and an iOS user.
Also, note that you need a space after the character (so "% search query", not "%search query").
Firefox is a great browser, but Looking Glass was enough for me to switch back to Chrome. I want Mozilla to do well, but like the author has said, their marketing team seems to have strange ideas of how to win, and it goes completely against the perception of what Mozilla is for.
I don't get it. Criticizing Mozilla for those things is fair, but switching to Chrome as a reaction to them doesn't make sense to me.
With Firefox, it's a breach of trust. The analytics stuff was a major fuck-up, and I would've accepted that apology if they didn't then align themselves with a TV company to run a promotion in my browser.
I could understand all of it if the code base was amazing, but when your flagship product receives exploits from bugs raised over a decade ago, before Chrome even existed, it's hard to trust Mozilla to be able to compete with Google.
Why aren't they working on Firefox then?
And anyways, I think by "win", they don't mean "make Chrome irrelevant". Competition drives innovation, and the Chrome team probably want to steal good ideas from Firefox, find the feature that will put them back on top, etc... They are likely to get more resources and a more interesting job than by staying alone on top.
The best part is that Mozilla and Google are not really competitors when it comes to browsers. Google doesn't make money from Chrome, it is just a gateway to their profitable services. But Firefox works too: and ad impression on Firefox is not worth less than an ad impression on Chrome.
True, but Firefox might add more aggressive ad blocking, whereas Chrome might want to disable/discourage that.
I recall there being an issue on Mozilla's bug tracker where someone brought this up and it was closed as a wontfix. Unless there is something about Firefox's container system that obviates my workflow, I'm still reluctantly sticking with Chrome.
However, they could stand do the documentation themselves, or at least setting up the context of the blog-post a little more.
I am not worried by the reference to the post, Piro may not have the most pretty site, but his writeups are great!
MDN is one of the best achievements of Mozilla, so I worry when I see it is not updated with their own technologies.
1. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/11/08/extensions-in-fir...
I have been waiting for this feature for I don't know how many years.
Every Firefox release, I am reminded of this xkcd comic:
I also have a brutally long Trello card that used to choke up Firefox (not as bad on Chrome). Happy to say that is no longer happening either.
Unfortunately Gmail still looks to have optimization that only work in Chrome. For whatever reason the time from first load to seeing the compose window after clicking "compose" is brutally slow in FFX, but not in Chrome.
> Multiple tab selection: We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window.
Anyone else finding this?
Either Chrome is sending data home, or it is "very secure". It can't be both.
What I was trying to get at is that if data is being sent from a product to the manufacturer without your knowledge and consent, then that is a data breach no matter how trustworthy the collector of the data is. Such products cannot reasonably be called "very secure" in a blanket way.
Saying something like "very secure against outside attackers" would be more correct as, to use the Chrome example, Google is an inside attacker.
Do you have any privacy extensions installed or the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" about:config pref enabled? privacy.resistFingerprinting is known to cause problems with reCAPTCHA v3:
https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-s...
It works 90% of the time for me.
Just want to say thank you to the developers of Firefox. Thank you for all the hard work to continue to improve a great product.
Reading the release notes:
Improved performance for Mac and Linux users, by enabling link time optimization (Clang LTO). (Clang LTO was enabled for Windows users in Firefox 63.)
Maybe in another few dozen releases they'll fix it. Doesn't Mozilla realize how many people develop on MacOS? Everyone I know develops on a Mac.
(I have the same issue and I'd like to switch to Firefox)
I use Firefox exclusively and have done so for the last 2 years or so. This sounds like it could be a driver issue for specific macs. Both my macs have AMD Radeon chipsets & quad core i7s.
Anyway, I'm sure this issue is real. Bugzilla ticket numbers probably exist for it and might be more helpful than vague complaints about things being slow.
Of course some web sites are a bit unreasonably javascript heavy these days. The downside of a large screen is that pushing a lot of pixels around is not free. Usually closing any offending tabs immediately restores any cpu usage I see. I'd suggest using the new task manager thingy (page menu->more->task manager)
When I switch to the "default" scaling (1440x900 and 1280x800, respectively), it stops. Only the 15" has a discrete GPU, eliminating that as potentially causal.
The "problem" scaling is 1.5x. The default is 2x.
It seems like they are aware of the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
If you have performance issues; you might want to check whether you need to blame the browser or some of your extensions.
This is a known issue, and has been around since at least v57. There are multiple Bugzilla issues on it. The cause is known. It isn't extensions. The fix is just invasive, and apparently ongoing.
The thread-parent absolutely cast a wider net than warranted, but everyone in this discussion who has experienced this problem knows exactly which one we're talking about, and the rest are all, "I've never seen a problem!" or "It's probably just extensions." Meanwhile, there's reliably a sub-thread somewhere in the discussion on nearly every article about Firefox, about this problem.
I find it profoundly ironic that you comment down-thread that "humans are very prone to confusing things which affect them personally with the general case" about a thing which you haven't personally experienced. You talk as if those of us for whom this is a 100% reproducible problem are an edge case, based AFAICT solely on your own not suffering it, coupled with your (not incorrect) beliefs about people poorly attributing performance problems in general.
That juxtaposition is really galling.
I recently switched to Brave Developer Edition [1], which now supports Chrome extensions (which I need for work/pleasure). It runs circles around Firefox and Chrome, and maintains my privacy better.
Previously it was a tradeoff of getting speed (Chrome) or maintaining privacy (Firefox). For me, Brave does better on both counts, and now that it supports extensions I'm completely sold.
For pageloads Brave might do better if it blocks various stuff by default, of course.
This is one of the key differentiating factors of Brave. Maybe next time don’t lead with accusations of cognitive bias.
It's been like this for at least 2 years now on my MBP 2015.
That said, I've thought this before and turned out to be wrong. But it looks like it might be real this time.
Its all politics, but once 80% of browsers support it, the pressure will be on Apple to finally let us use an image format from this century.
I wish we had a simple UI we could bring up to expose cookies to other tabs (arbitrarily). I just want a list of cookies with rows marked in green if they're being sent with requests, red rows for cookies that would normally be sent for the same [sub]domain but are currently not, and then gray cookies that are established from completely unrelated domains. To me this would be better than maintaining tab profiles/containers that are for business/personal/etc. This would be like a one-off UI before you determine if you want to establish a container profile.
Also I want them to take tree tabs seriously. There is a plugin for this, but it doesn't look like a tree at all.. I am grateful for the plugin, I just wish it were a UI effort focused on. I cannot maintain more than 40 tabs open and easily browse through them. I'm tired of the response being "well don't".
I wondered this yesterday because suffixing with "64" is a common way to denote such a thing. I looked into it and as far as I could tell, no, it's just version 64 of Firefox, so I mentioned that in an attempting-to-be-helpful comment here, but it got downvoted. So now I'm wondering if my research was wrong. Can anyone clarify, please? I'm really confused about this now.
about:preferences -> browsing -> uncheck "Recommend extensions as you browse"
[GFX1-]: shader-cache: Shader disk cache is not supported
Does anyone know why that error is showing up?
If it's not finished it's alpha.
Beta is pretty much just used as "buyer beware" nowadays, like a disclaimer "we take no responsibility for our bugs".
Looking at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/adcc169dcf58c2e45b... it looks like that error means the disk cache was not created.
So either get_cache_path_from_prof_path failed to return a path or create_dir_all failed.
I haven't dug through more details, but I'm pretty sure the shader cache code there is new and am not at all sure it's completely hooked up yet.
Assuming you're on non-Windows, the message is expected and not indicative of a problem. I've pushed a patch to disable it going forward. Sorry for the noise.
I hope multi-accounts containers will land soon on Android. The phone is where I feel the least in control of what's happening on the browser.
Progress?
Edit: if you don't unselect and close a tab you lose all your pins...
``` #sidebar-splitter { display: none } ```
To fix add this: ``` vbox#sidebar-box.chromeclass-extrachrome[src] { border-right: none !important } ```
https://www.zdnet.com/article/malicious-sites-abuse-11-year-... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377496
EDIT: Dang, guess the spittle brigade is really out in force today. Anyone downvoting want to maybe respond in substance as to why they think Firefox should continue ignoring security issues that have been open since the Bush administration?
Just to check, is that sarcasm? Because having those end up the same for users who use non-default colors is a _very_ common webdev mistake...
And what do you mean by using non-default colors? User stylesheets would also include scrollbar colors anyway; do you mean just setting a background but no text color (assuming a default of black, which might not be black for the user)? Don't see how this could apply to this CSS property, since it takes two colors, you either set both or none.
It seems logical to me that if you can read the text on the web page, that is, if the web dev hasn't made the common mistake that renders the text unreadable, they will set the scrollbar colors to something of similar "quality". If you can't read the text because they use CSS badly, then the scrollbar color is the least of your worries. QED?
Generally speaking, there are a lot of "common webdev mistakes", like using the giant images and scaling them down, having text and background color very close together... but we don't take that away just because some abuse it, so resisting more flexibility on those grounds doesn't strike me as so "obvious" as people seem to agree it is. If you can allow websites to hide the mouse cursor, I don't think the web will break because of this CSS property. If you don't want to see it on any page, override it in your user stylesheet, done.
I object to this as well, but that's a battle that was lost a long time ago.
Yes, I do see the usefulness of being able to do all of those things, but in practice, I don't appreciate it when it's done. I'm not saying that it's abusive (and I'm not talking about egregious misuse of these abilities), I'm just saying that I personally dislike it when sites do this sort of thing.
I fear that I've come off as too militant on these issues -- as a web dev, you should do what you deem best. As a user, if your choices are too annoying to me, I'll just avoid your site.
I think this whole thing just plays into a personal issue I have over the web these days... from a usability and aesthetic standpoint, the web has been noticeably declining for me over the past few years.
That I can certainly agree with. I also think users should be able to override and customize things... ideally, everybody gets more options? And user agents should absolutely be user agents, instead of brochure displays.
While design may be somewhat subjective, I also think websites are getting worse. If that's a "personal issue", we both have it :D Just the last one I just looked at, that made me think "why? who is this for?"
vs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081210082207/http://www.opensu...
I just think marketing (and mobile?) play a much larger role in the downfall of the web and the rise of generic copy drowning in padding, than all the stuff we can do with CSS.
Example from Codepen: https://vgy.me/IBmcUz.png
I would, reader modes are a godsend that revert the web back to how it should have always been, with the client controlling the text and background color in a way consistent with the rest of the system.
Content display should be up to the user, not the designer.
I never used them, but Opera had a few preset user stylesheets right there in the "view" menu at the top of the window, that was neat. One was "C64" IIRC. Silly, but neat ^^
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Alternative...
If styleesheets could have placeholders for some system colors (maybe even fonts?), that could be something.. turn nightmode on/off, or just generally change colors, and all programs and all websites fade! I would actually love "having to" make 3 stylesheets, one super fancy one, a print stylesheet, and a "system colors" one. Or don't even stop with colors, do it like Magic User Interface on the Amiga, let the user configure how they want all sorts of input and information fields to be formatted and behave... some people want material design (they're wrong of course, but if they must be wrong, I want them to at least be wrong and happy, rather than wrong and unhappy), others want gradients and bevels and shadows everywhere, let everybody set it how they want. Some people want lots of padding, others want tight padding and negative linespacing and tiny fonts, etc.
Awww, now I'm super excited about something that doesn't exist... I can taste it, it would be so awesome! This is the wrong timeline :/
As such, they should be off limits to web designer's whims.
As an aside, my experience with web sites over the years (particularly recently) doesn't exactly give me a great deal of confidence that they would make appropriate choices for the appearance of these controls.
Depends on the browser, but e.g. text area colors can be styled anyway (and therefore made unusable, how irresponsible that CSS allows for this), and whether scrollbars show up in the first place is CSS, too. You can override that with user stylesheets if you want, but no need to hardcode that for everybody.
> doesn't exactly give me a great deal of confidence that they would make appropriate choices for the appearance of these controls.
You're now the third person to say this, and the second to do so while ignoring what I responded to that point, so again:
If you can't read the text, why do you care about the scrollbar? If you can read the text, why do you worry about the scrollbar? In what conceivable practical scenario do you gain anything? The very same people who picked all the other colors might also color the scrollbar, but how is going to make a default scrollbar make an otherwise unusable site usable?
We can already hide scrollbars, but coloring them differently, that's a problem? I don't buy it, as they say. How is an ugly scrollbar, or one that uses the same color twice and is unusable that way, worse than none?
Because it's not really about being able to read the text. It's about usability and my preference for appearance.
"How is an ugly scrollbar, or one that uses the same color twice and is unusable that way, worse than none?"
It's not. None is worse, by far.
And I say that as someone who's tweaked scrollbars but only in userContent / userChrome configs.
I do NOT want you to try and make my UI look "pretty" (or whatever). I want it to be FUNCTIONAL.
chrome://flags/#top-chrome-md
I've got mine set to 'Normal'.
I mean, other than the fact all "modern" websites suck now too.
just joking! :-P
- Read about new firefox version
- "I should give it a try again"
- Update and start new firefox
- Open spiegel.de and youtube.com (note: with pi-hole active!)
- Fans of RMBP go crazy, scrolling a news article lags like it's 1999
- "Well, let's hope for a better/usable performance with the next update. I'd love to use it after all..."
:(
Folks, the UI look and feel stuff really matters. You can't treat a platform like a second-class citizen and hope to gain widespread adoption.
Anyway surely this is not a showstopper. I mean it is not functional in any way.
Apps that don't do this both look and feel weird.
Maybe not a showstopper if Firefox were offering unavailable-anywhere-else behavior, but it's completely natural and predicable that users will migrate to one of the other two major browsers that care enough to make themselves fit in w/ the system they are running on.
^^^ This attitude sucks!
UX is everything if you want your software to be used by the masses.
I despise it and would get frustrated at web sites that use it.
macOS feature adopted from iOS where when you try to scroll past the end of a document, rather than just doing nothing, it sort of stretches/bounces/rubber-bands past the bounds and then snaps back.
It's nice because (1) it feels believable and physical (2) it gives you feedback that you really are at the end of the document, rather than just the computer lagging.
Yes, the feedback is useful, though I'd never really realised that until now. Thanks.