Firefox 65.0 released | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 65.0 released

mozilla.org

724 pointstheodorejb414 comments

Recently switched from chromium to Firefox. Very pleased with its performance.

Android Firefox demolishes chrome too but probably just because I no longer need to download and render all the ads (thanks ublock.)

While I was at it I also took the chance to migrate passwords out of Google land into Bitwarden.

Session restore is amazing, my .cache is tmpfs but it still manages to instantly recover all my tabs on reboot. Tabs are addictive in FF and don't have the same usage constraints like in chrome.

The container system for managing different developer/test/personal profiles is a dream. No longer have to worry about Slack links opening in whatever random chrome instance had focus last. (Back up your user data, sync on these container settings doesn't work - yet)

Also enjoying different proxy profiles per Firefox profile as well.

Yes,

Work profile + work containers + works SSH tunnel proxy.

Personal profile + personal containers + NordVPN.

Passwords managed by bitwarden and any required crossover is shared via a private organisation. This gives me minimal work access on my phone, and minimal private passwords on my work profile.(GitHub/stack overflow)

It's kind of complicated but it's such a quality of life change coming from 20 odd chrome profiles and the nasty sync issues that ensues. Most people can probably get by with a single profile. I just have multiple systems and need to keep work stuff separate but end up using work laptop as a daily driver most of the time.

Can you expand on how you set up the profile + containers + vpn and how that works for you?

Think he means this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

At least that's for controlling them easily. I use it for Whatsapp web on 2 accounts

Yup that's for containers. It looks like development sorta died on it but I think they will circle back once infrastructure work has been done for sync.

For proxies you can use whatever vpn service or plugin[1]. I use paid Nord because I need consistent access to certain countries for testing. There is some tunnel bear/Nord like plugins that have lists of free proxies.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxy-switche...

Profile manager info:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

See other comment for container/proxy info.

+1 for Bitwarden - it's been fun to watch that product unfold.

I’ve wanted to try BitWarden, but haven’t because I couldn’t find a way to use it as a standalone app without creating an account on its site or without having to self-host it. I prefer a solution that allows me to choose where to sync the password database.

keepass?

Just run a bitwarden server locally, that's what I do.

Especially easy with bitwarden-rs or bitwarden-go (written in rust and go accordingly) instead of having to pull down the bitwarden blessed MS SQL stuff.

I've pretty much made the same changes. I was luke-warm on the switch from chrome to Firefox until I started using containers and CookieAutoDelete with those containers. I have a 'Google' container that preserves google cookies for when I log into gmail (transition in progress)- but otherwise google cookies get automatically deleted. There are a handful of other sites I wish to stay logged into - like github, slack, spotify - and I have containers for them with CookieAutoDelete configured accordingly. Its also comes in handy for sites where I have a work account and a personal account - like AWS. Instead of having to open an incognito window to allow being signed into two accounts at the same time, I just have separate containers. Makes a lot of practical sense for me.

I also made the switch to Bitwarden - except for me I was using Lastpass before. Bitwarden has a much cleaner interface and a sane sharing scheme. Trying to keep shared passwords in sync with my wife in Lastpass was an absolute nightmare - to the point that I hated changing the passwords - which is one of the major points of a password manager. Lastpass has become stagnant and bloated since LogMeIn bought it.

So Bitwarden is basically Lastpass except you can also host it yourself?

Yea but you don't have to. I don't have a lot of experience with 1pass/last pass but I assume they're the same. I liked that Bitwarden was free, that I could do my own server, and that I can do dual account sharing via org setup - all free accounts.

You can host it yourself - I don't. The interface is much cleaner and easier to use IMHO, especially if you use password sharing. At the end of the day its a password manager, and there are plenty to choose from. I used to be a big Lastpass fan - but their quality has continued to degrade and competitors have stepped up their game. If I didn't end up using Bitwarden, I probably would have ended up with 1Password.

What are you going to transition to from Gmail?

Not the original poster, but I would recommend to anybody that they move to Fastmail.

what about protonmail?

Protonmail limits the number of domains you can use. Fastmail has a much higher limit.

I have a protonmail premium account and I'm disappointed. First you can't use a native client in linux because the bridge isn't released yet (in the faq it's written it's planned to be released early 2018 lol). The android client doesn't like the fact that I desactived the google play service on my phone (how can a privacy focused email depends of the google play service? ). They hooked me up because they said that they where going to open sourcing protonmail, but for the moment neither the bridge nor the android/ios client are open source.

I unfortunately have to second this.

The bridge solution is a nice attempt at supporting open standards, but it's not on Linux or Android which basically means my email is silo-ed. I can't use it with my regular mail client and the ProtonMail client will never be all things to everybody.

The android client at least does seem to run just fine without Play Services, it just pops up annoying notifications saying it needs them.

At this stage I'm probably looking at migrating away.

I'd really like a mail provider that lets me forward a few addresses to the rest of my family since I own lastname.nz, but that doesn't seem possible on most mail hosts without a full x-user enterprise setup.

another vote for Fastmail from me

I'd be careful with that one, due to recent developments in Australia, more or less banning encryption (and legalising subverting employees of companies without the company's knowledge, to break their encryption schemes secretly). Until we know more, not a single Australian product can be trusted and even Australian employees of companies working overseas can't be trusted anymore. It's horrific.

I've been on Fastmail for just over a year and it's been very reliable and effective.

My only concern with Fastmail is they're Australia-based and the government there seems rather hostile to privacy.

This is exactly why the new encryption laws are so detrimental to the Aussie tech industry.

I'm currently giving ProtonMail a try - but I'm also using a custom domain. My current thoughts are that I'll switch everything over to my custom domain, and then I'll never be locked into an email provider again. If ProtonMail doesn't pan out, I'll switch to someone else - still keeping my custom domain. My reliance on google and my attempts to move out of it has really been an eye opening experience I hope to not repeat.

I went with Tutanota.com which on top of active development also communicates regularly with its users on what features are being worked on. Plus they allow you to have/create a bunch of different email addresses under the same mailbox.

Was similarly lukewarm to the change. I actually only made the change because I was having resource issues with chrome and bookmark interactions would lock the screen for a few hundred milliseconds - tried everything. Eventually you just blame the vendor and switch.

But now, well, I don't really see me going back any time soon.

Last I checked, containers weren't working properly, and I gave up on the idea because false sense of security is worse. My test website was web.whatsapp.com. I think this is the tracker, although I didn't really look too much into it (https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/8...

Edit: fixed link

Have you tried that again since September 2017? I can’t seem to reproduce the issue on my machine. (By the way, the link includes an extra underscore. The correct one is https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/8... )

Yes, I can still reproduce it on 64. I'm on linux though.

On Linux, works for me. Using add-on version if that helps. There is a bug that opening a url via e.g. xdg isn't able to prevent default tab opening on first startup.

Pretty sure I figured this out, since I was able to reproduce it as well. It has to do with caching and something Whatsapp is doing to restore the page from local data most likely, as once you clear the local data for web.whatsapp.com, it correctly requests redirecting to the correct container.

If I had to guess, I suspect that Firefox triggers the container switch dialog on the first network request, and that page is so optimized that after the first visit it loads entirely from cache and/or localstorage data without any network activity at all.

If true, it might be that while it didn't switch, it actually wasn't leaking data between containers at all, since there was no network activity. I'm not sure if a background request would have triggered a container switch dialog, been blocked quietly, or have been allowed through some root page permissions cascade.

I may be far off, and this is trivially checkable, but I'm out of time.

I had a look at the github issue, and what worked was this comment: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/8...

You can try this if it affects you.

You like the "Temporary Containers" extension. It automatically creates a new container for every site that doesn't already have an assigned container. The temporary container (cookies, etc) get deleted 30 minutes after you close the last tab for the container's site.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I use Sandboxie with a browser instance without cookies or cache. It automatically deletes files after closure. Only the browser is allowed internet access.

For specific services like my primary email, I have an isolated Firefox instance keep the cookies for that service only. I don't use that instance for anything but that service. Is there anything I'm giving them (besides what information you give by using the service at all of course)in keeping the cookie? Just want to be aware of any risk I may have overlooked.

I just found my new fave FF extension. Thank you for sharing this!

Are profiles something available on vanilla Firefox (no extensions)? Thanks!

You can open about:profiles and use it to manage/start them, I think

Yes but it's clunky compared to chrome.

Manager:

firefox -p

Ordirect access:

firefox -p "account name"

I believe containers are available without an add-on using aboutconfig but that may have changed or it may not be full functionality.

Im also suprised by the firefox performance on android. Ive noticed it can render pages chrome cannot, which is so suprising considering googles investment in progressive web apps and how some of their new android go apps use chrome to render.

Firefox is faster than Chrome on Android? For me, even scrolling HN (i.e. no JS at all) was jittery and laggy.

In my experience the minimum hardware baseline for Firefox is higher than Chrome but the optimal hardware baseline is lower.

I switched to Firefox on Android a few years ago and it was unpleasant until I upgrade my phone. At the time I was running a Nexus 4 and moved to a Nextbit Robin.

My partner switched to Firefox on a Google Pixel and regularly complains about issues with it's performance which makes me wonder if Google has done some optimizations to Chrome on the Pixel.

I think you're both right. On my Essential Phone (Snapdragon 835 running stock Android 9) pages tend to _render_ quicker in FF, but scrolling, pinch to zoom etc. is smoother in Chrome.

I also find that Firefox will bog down after a month and I have to manually delete out its cache in app settings. I haven't had to do this for Chrome since back in the Android 5.x era.

The latter might also be due to extensions

I could see that.

Not the issue in my case though.. I don't use any extensions on my mobile browsers.

Heh, maybe it's the opposite then! Like an accumulation of shitty trackers, because you don't use uBlock or privacy badger or the like. That would be pretty ironic

Trackers do not really accumulate though, no? Or can they install something persistent (web workers maybe?)

Store stuff in IndexedDB?

Scrolling in Firefox on Android is smoother, ie. more consistent 60fps, than Chrome for me for a few months now. It used to be very bad but suddenly improved dramatically.

Huh, your right. Scrolling in Firefox on Android was awful for years, and was the main reason i stuck with chrome. I'll have to give it a proper go now...

I feel like it has gotten a bit better with this update. Or, at least the release notes mention better scrolling performance and I'm imaging it.

I hadn't heard about Bitwarden. Looks like it requires 2-4GB of RAM and a x86 CPU to run your own server due to relying on MS SQL server. Bummer!

The 2-4GB RAM isn’t a hard requirement in my experience. I initially had the whole Docker compose stack running on a single $5 DigitalOcean droplet, and didn’t experience any issues for personal usage. Since they also distribute it to you as Docker containers, you can also set resource limits, specifically for the MSSQL container, to prevent it from hogging all the RAM.

I currently have my Bitwarden instance hosted on my Docker swarm cluster, which is just 3 $5 DO droplets and 1 with like 2GB and RAM and 2vCPUs. But, a quick look shows that currently all the BW containers are running on the $5 ones. I have the MSSQL container’s RAM limited to 1GB as well.

As for the x86 requirement, that’s likely the case, I’m assuming you mentioned it because you’d like to run it on some ARM device like a RPi. I haven’t tried running their containers on an ARM device so I can’t say they’ll be compatible, but I know docker’s ARM compatibility has improved so maybe someone has got them running on some ARM device.

The requirement is 2GB. Where do you see 4GB?

There's an unofficial rust implementation[0] that runs in a docker image and uses sqlite for persistence. I don't know what the details are for storing data at-rest in the sqlite db, but it's supposed to be much better on system resources.

0: https://github.com/dani-garcia/bitwarden_rs

Thanks!

You can run the Bitwarden Rust implementation on a Raspberry Pi with resources to spare.

If you aren't hitting it hard (hosting more than a few connections) you won't notice much limiting to 1GB RAM... I run a couple projects with MS-SQL docker containers and 1GB limit...

    docker run -m 1GB --restart unless-stopped --name sql -h sql -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" -e "MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD=Let-Me-In" -p 1433:1433 -d microsoft/mssql-server-linux:2017-latest

I tend to change the name and port mapping as necessary depending on use, but that's the quickest way to get a server up for MS-SQL... can use SQL Server Management Studio (windows) or Azure Data Studio [1][ (electron, formerly SQL Operations Studio) which is cross platform[2].

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/azuredatastudio [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/azuredatastudio/releases

I've been pretty happy with https://www.passwordstore.org/ Keeps passwords encrypted in git, and there's plugins and open source apps for just about everything. Throw your store in a private repo somewhere and you're good to go, no need to worry about Bitwarden or Lastpass or anyone else going out of business.

I made another attempt to switch from Chrome to Firefox only now, like I've been doing every year or so for several years now. Sort of a tradition.

This time it was the extensions that didn't cut it. One of the first things I do (after importing the bookmarks) is to install the same extensions, or find their equivalents.

I heavily use customized mouse gestures. The extension I use on Chrome works like a charm. On Firefox, I tried five in a row.

They would either be very poor in terms of options and customizability, or request 10+ bizarre permissions (which really have nothing to do with functionality I expect from them - such as "read the text of all open tabs", or "monitor extension usage"), or very cumbersome to customize. I've really got fed up after trying out several in a row.

Well - I'll wait another year.

It might be worth contacting the author of the Chrome extension and asking them if they'd be interested in porting; since Firefox's WebExtensions API is a superset of the Chrome extension API, it should hopefully not require too much effort.

There's also an extension called "chrome store firefoxified" that lets you install chrome extensions in firefox. Might be worth a try.

> I made another attempt to switch from Chrome to Firefox only now, like I've been doing every year or so for several years now. Sort of a tradition.

Same here! (except i'm using Brave instead of Chrome, it's also Chromium based and supports its extensions, without the Google tracking features.)

I don't understand why after so many years Firefox still doesn't support "pinch to zoom" on Macbooks/Laptops. For me it's such a basic feature, almost like a car without a proper steering wheel... not very smart if you want to attract more users.

At last, someone created an extension ("Multi-touch Zoom" https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom ), but unfortunately, it often doesn't work properly, like for example on this website...

On all my Linux systems (NixOS), Firefox lags/skips while scrolling all the time. It's a deal breaker for me so I use Chromium, which scrolls without lagging. I read it is because Firefox does not use HW graphics acceleration on Linux, in general. This is both on a computer with the NVidia driver and one with the open-source radeon driver.

Hardware acceleration is disabled by default because many graphics drivers suck and will break the browser if hardware acceleration is turned on. You can just go into the settings and turn it on (and then off, if you have problems).

Chromium disables hardware acceleration by default for a wide swatch of graphics drivers too (including all Nvidia GPUs).

On my current Linux system with NVidia drivers, HW acceleration is enabled according to chrome://gpu (there are many accelerations and some are disabled, but many are enabled including Canvas and Compositing). Regardless of all, Chromium works just great, including smooth scrolling and WebGL, and Firefox doesn't (laggy scrolling, slower WebGL than in Chromium). I don't think the problem is with drivers but with Firefox.

> Chromium disables hardware acceleration by default for a wide swatch of graphics drivers too (including all Nvidia GPUs).

From what I remember reading, it disables it for nouveau driver, not the NVidia driver which works. This is supported by the fact my Chromium is currently using HW accel on NVidia without me having forced anything.

I did try enabling HW accel in Firefox and it did not solve laggy scrolling. I don't think it even really got enabled, I think it's forcibly disabled even if you try to override it.

you're correct, it's definitely just nouveau that's blacklisted, not the proprietary nvidia driver.

Chromium also has hw accel enabled by default for intel drivers, which is by far the most used gpu driver on linux (and is pretty stable in my experience). Firefox doesn't even have it enabled for intel

This is the exact reason I have not been able to switch back to FF, but on Windows. Enabling HW acceleration did not fix it.

I'm using FF on AMD and Intel GPUs, and works smooth

Firefox has an option to uncheck Smooth Scrolling. So if you press the spacebar, the page instantly jumps down instead of showing the page quickly scroll. I don't know if this would help.

If you really think Firefox is faster on Android, that you have not tried the optimized Kiwi Browser. Try it, and report back how much faster kiwi is compared to Firefox hehe

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...

How "safe" and separated are profiles?

For example, suppose I had a "Casual Browsing" profile and a "Banking" profile.

Could I have both profiles running at the same time and not risk any contamination?

If I were to pick up something bad in one profile, could it leak over to the other?

Unless 65 is faster it's not worth it to me... I work very fast, like Chrome, like other apps on my OS, and there's no excuse for Firefox to run slow like it does on my Windows and Mac still.

> Passwords managed by bitwarden

Is there a specific reason you don't use Firefox' password manager? (Read: Do I have reason to migrate out of it?)

It's obvious browser password managers are broken in a way it never locks its database, so anyone with physical access can log in to all the site you have passwords for, which also means changing password is easy as logging into your gmail also requires no knowledge.

To this day I can't believe none of the browsers actually try to fix this by at least locking the password database after a certain period like any password managers do. Safari at least disallows you from looking at the list of sites you have passwords for by requiring you to enter your account password but never asks you anything at each site's login.

For this reason, I never use browser based password managers.

You can protect your password DB with a master password on Firefox, though it only will be 'locked' when you close the program. AFAIK this is not too dissimilar from the model for most password managers.

If there was an option to import chrome passwords into Firefox I couldn't find it.

> Read: Do I have reason to migrate out of it?

No, but I suggest you try it out for a day or two, see what you think.

Doesn't Firefox give you the option of importing everything (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) from another browser the first time you fire it up?

IIRC, it also does this the first time you launch it under a new profile.

To log into mobile apps, for Wifi passwords, file passwords, etc.

And yet Firefox still doesn't have pull to refresh. How can they not support such a basic feature?

I don't particularly care for pull to refresh, given how frequently I refresh without meaning to because of it, but I do wish I didn't have to open the dropdown menu to get a refresh button to refresh the page.

I’m a diehard Firefox user and supporter, but with every release there are still things I wait on the WebExtensions support to improve:

1. There’s still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That’s been a big bummer for some years now.

2. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev).

3. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.

Best not hold your breath. You are an old-school power user and 99.9% of users no longer know or care about any of the functionality you're talking about.

I don't have any specific retorts to your points other than pointing you to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cach... for a Lazarus replacement (although I thought Firefox does this by default, and I don't understand why you need an extension at all).

Thanks for the pointer to this extension. I'll check it out. One of the things Lazarus provided (at the cost of adding some effort in maintaining privacy) was to save the history of form fields across sites and across restarts. In my knowledge, Firefox allows saving text fields, but not text areas. Periodic saving and history were quite helpful especially when writing longer walls of text like on HN comments or posts on other platforms.

I also come to the comments on every Firefox release to see if anything improved on that front. We've been waiting for years indeed, and I guess the only way to get the functionality back is to maintain a set of custom patches (forking basically)... Still disappointed about pushing web extensions with no alternatives available at the time, and if I had looked into the future, I'd have thought the crystal ball was broken as there is still no compatibility years down the line.

Have you looked at https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ ?

It's basically XUL Firefox w/o WebExtension crap (they played with WebExtensions and bailed).

Made by the same people who make Pale Moon, it's basically a successor.

The main downside, of course, is the XUL extension authors are unlikely to keep updating their extensions now the XUL is dead on OG Firefox.

I've tried the 64 bit version of Pale Moon several years ago and it didn't seem as performant as Firefox (could've been due to the setup and environment; I didn't bother to investigate deeper). The fact that many XUL extensions have been abandoned or have stopped development is a concern though. Thanks for the Basilisk mention. It may be a good alternative for older machines that the current Firefox doesn't support.

yep.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411795

FF65 also supports WebP images and animations. Here's few test images: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery1

After 8 years, thank god! Image heavy pages load 40% faster now, like my photography index with lots more test images: https://shan.io/photography/

Cool, thanks for the tip. Went to the page and was disappointed to see broken webp images - then checked Google play for updates, got the latest ff - went back and could see the webp images :) Finally.... We've been waiting too long...

I wish they implemented the feature sooner. AVIF, an image format based on the new AV1 video codec with even better compression is already on the horizon.

Yes. As much as I was hoping they'd implement it back then, I kind of wish that they didn't implement it now. If they couldn't do it years ago, might as well wait for AVIF instead of letting webp proliferate.

I was intrigued by this statement:

> A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1

Since I don't care about Windows, I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not. At least using Firefox Developer Edition v66, it works fine behind the media.av1.enabled flag on Linux.

----

Also seems that https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... has yet to be updated.

> I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not.

AV1 support is available on all platforms behing the flag; this release just enables it by default on Windows [1].

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452146

AV1 also uses the brand new media codec sandboxing feature (RDD process). It has platform specific code, hence why only Windows was ready by 65 (but Mac + Linux should be available soon).

> Support for Handoff on macOS: Continue browsing across devices. Pick up where you left off with iOS (via Firefox or Safari) on Firefox on Mac.

OH YES! Finally!

I tried both Safari and Chrome of macOS but went back to Firefox for one simple reason. When watching streaming content if the browser was not in the foreground it would reduce the quality of the streamed content which could take almost ten seconds to revert back when focus was given.

Firefox doesn't seem to know/care if its not top window

Safari user, always play videos in a background window, never seen this. I suspect it’s not the browser’s video playback but perhaps more to do with how it handles spikes and drops in connection quality?

This alone makes me consider Firefox again!

Handoff (when it works)is just so useful.

Still a little flaky even for apple apps so interested to see how it works on Firefox.

I didn't realize Handoff was even possible for third party apps!

I suppose there is no way to make it work with Firefox on Windows and iOS? That would be awesome!

The architecture for Handoff isn’t available on Windows (and it would be much more complex than a simple library since so much of the networking and Bluetooth stacks are entirely different between platforms), so no. I think Windows has its own, similar thing but, of course, iOS wouldn’t know how to communicate with it.

I have turned on Webrender in FF66a (nightly) and it’s fantastic; it sped up a site I quickly threw together for a friend no end [1] and almost everything with lots of graphical painting is buttery smooth.

Even though they are only starting in nightly to make it the default on Nvidia hardware it seems to work without incident so far on this 2016 AMD Radeon’d MacBook Pro.

[1] https://uparchitects.co.uk/

[2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/have-you-tested-webrender/16...

Well the limit in nightly to nvidia on windows is less about saying “we think WebRender only works/is stable on nvidia on windows” than it is about saying “we want more people to try it and possibly send big reports but we don’t want to risk breaking the entire nightly population or have them all sending in big reports, so we will start with a small subpopulation where we think bugs will be due to WebRender rather than graphics drivers”

Ah fantastic, definitely good to stagger the releases. I do understand the driver/stability situation being much more fragmented on Windows, just nice to be able to confirm how big the improvements are to Firefox that are still to come; the fastest browser by a long way IMO!

Is there any way to enable it outside nightly builds?

Yes the same instructions should work but you might get a more buggy version of Web Render as it'll be an older less debugged version.

I don't understand why Firefox doesn't include an option to download the .deb package instead of tar file for Ubuntu and Debian during release announcements. The market share is already shrinking and why make it harder for people to install or upgrade Firefox? Chrome does it. Why can't Firefox do that as well?

You can update easily Firefox from tar file, it has local updates no need for official repository.

I'm just guessing here, but Chrome is not packaged by the distro whilst Firefox is.

Personally I like the tar. That's my preferred way to use Firefox in Debian. I untar on ~/apps/firefox, symlink to my ~/bin and it is ready to go. The auto-update of Firefox works perfect, so I don't need to use Debian packages for that.

This brings up an interesting point about releasing software in general. If you spend huge amounts of time programming cool things and tuning every last knob, but then it is difficult for your average user to find out how to install and start to see all the cool things you've produced, when it would take far less time to just make an easy installer than it took you to make all the cool things, then there needs to be some balance in usability. The pipeline to getting the software in front of someone is sometimes more important than adding new cool features. A basic thing that is easy to use will get more adoption than a mind-blowingly awesome thing that only sys-admins can figure out how to use.

"Ubuntu and Debian" "average user"

I dont disagree with your point, not sure it is relevant however.

hmm. I upgrade my VSCode pretty much all the time they do a release because they provide a .deb file. Installing the upgrade is as simple as double-clicking on the file. I am sure pretty much all the users of Ubuntu and Debian are capable of doing a Firefox upgrade if they really wanted to. But no harm in making it easier.

Yup I wasnt saying we shouldnt provide .deb files, I dont know why we dont and sounds like a perfectly reasonable request.

I was just replying to the comment making a point about being accessible to the average user, the average user of Firefox is not manually installing updates on Ubuntu

Hehe, point taken. That's the paretto principle too, spending a bunch of time on a small segment of your users wouldn't make much sense either, especially since most of them are fully capable of working with the system as it is.

Also, since it updates in place anyways, which is nifty, I guess this comment mainly applies to other software I've used which is a royal pain to install...

I think they should at least do some A/B testing on whether including a .deb package increases the downloads or upgrades significantly to justify the time and cost.

I have an older friend who used Ubuntu on his laptop, as he had never used Windows and just wanted a simple web browsing capable laptop (before the days of Chromebooks)

The number of times I've discovered umpteen copies of Firefox tarballs on his desktop, and every time he complains it's been a pain to 'upgrade Firefox'

Sure, I could have done more handholding, but yes, Firefox could certainly have made it easier back then and still today.

Also in my experience is always painful to have more than a version of firefox; a firefox-stable.deb and a firefox-nightly.deb would be appreciated

The pretense that all Linux users should be (or already are) technically capable is really harmful to the ecosystem. No, you should not expect Ubuntu or Debian users to figure out on their own (1) why the tar.gz file they download doesn't do anything meaningful and (2) how they will get this version of Firefox instead without any further instructions.

Running Firefox from a tarball is a very specific use case for a small subset of highly technical users. Even if you figure out how to do it, the lack of system integration gives a very poor impression of the way things work on Linux. Even the vast majority of technical users don't want to run Firefox this way. Yet that's still what the website offers you.

We should be able to recommend at the very least Ubuntu to average users. And people do that, sometimes quite successfully. But with the attitude that all Linux users can save themselves - "we don't need to think about the UX" - we can't really keep doing that.

Wouldn't the average Ubuntu user be best off by getting it through the Ubuntu package repo once it's updated there? Or doesn't Ubuntu have a channel that would provide that soon by default?

Yes. The Firefox website should ideally provide some instructions - including a way to open the Firefox entry in the Ubuntu/Gnome Software Center, instead of giving users a tarball most don't know how to handle (and if they do know how to handle it, is not necessarily what they're looking for). The tarball should of course still be available as a download option, but almost all interested users (yes, even the technical ones) should use their distribution's package manager.

Well, yes and no. I'm precluded from installing new Firefox via apt-get because my Ubuntu version fell off active support. Running a dist-upgrade is risky, and I don't feel like doing it until I know I have a spare free day to fix everything in case of a problem. A Firefox PPA would be a nice thing to use instead, for now.

Average user: "Pee pee what now?"

If Firefox offered a .deb for $OS on their homepage, and Grandma attempts to install it while running $OTHEROS, then likely she will either 1) fail or 2) break her system. That's a worse user experience than a .tar.gz.

Asking Firefox to maintain packages for every outdated Debian-based distro is unreasonable. Nice to have, yes, but unreasonable to ask.

> No, you should not expect Ubuntu or Debian users to figure out on their own

If someone knows what Debian is and has chosen to install it I think its fairly safe to assume they have some Linux knowledge.

Ubuntu on the other hand is the most likely to work without any tweaking. Its the default choice for less technical people wanting to try Linux as well as more experienced people who want a hassle free install.

Maybe I should not have started with the distinction between "technical" and "non-technical".

My argument is that even technical users, with the skill to install Debian [1] or far beyond, should not have to figure out this problem. Even if your users can figure out how to solve such problems, they shouldn't have to confront them with a thing to figure out if you don't need to.

The Linux ecosystem is so full of the attitude "oh well, my users can figure it out". It really annoys me, and it really holds stuff back.

[1] This really is not an amazing skill. I know plenty moderately computer literate people capable of getting through the straightforward Debian installer that are not up to date on Linux packaging systems. Just think of all the intermediately skilled Windows users looking to switch.

> The Linux ecosystem is so full of the attitude "oh well, my users can figure it out". It really annoys me, and it really holds stuff back.

Or worse, you get devs with super high egos that will say "Anyone who can't understand a tar file is a freggin' idiot". Note that this is significantly toned down. Ever wondered where Internet troll culture comes from? Linux devs.

I don't think we should be encouraging an average Ubuntu user to download and install anything from source that has an actively maintained package. Average users of Ubuntu/Linux should only use the maintained Firefox package that comes pre-installed on basically every major dist these days.

I think Firefox or anyone else would be doing a disservice to an average user to make them think they need to manually install this software outside their package manager.

Wouldn’t non-technical users have installed Firefox from their GUI, using the distro’s variant?

The UX of deb and of tar are equivalent, relative to a GUI.

Which would be a valid point, if Mozilla's definition of "every last knob" didn't include such basic features as "customizable keyboard shortcuts" and "allowing unsigned side-loading of addons", which the product already had for the 15 years ending 2016.

Why not just use apt? It's already updated in the repository.

This may require updating your distribution.

and why hell do you keep updated your os ? I do a apt upgrade every week, and everything works fine.

I meant doing dist-upgrade, not apt upgrade.

Untar anywhere you like and run it from there. I recommend the home directory. You don’t even have to become root. This copy of Firefox should also update itself automatically.

It would be fantastic if this were more like .app bundles on macOS. It’s a special, self-contained folder that GUIs treat as the application binary (double click to launch, etc) but that power users can open as a folder or navigate inside of using a shell.

Then again, I though AppImage was supposed to be something like this?

just use the .snap package (they have all firefox channels as snaps stable, candidate, beta, edge)

channels: stable: 64.0.2-1 2019-01-10 (167) 216MB - candidate: 65.0-2 2019-01-28 (172) 217MB - beta: 66.0b3-1 2019-01-28 (173) 217MB - edge: 63.0b13-1 2018-10-09 (140) 206MB - esr/stable: 60.5.0esr-2 2019-01-28 (171) 213MB -

snap install firefox

If you install Firefox from the tarball, it a) doesn't require root permissions and b) autoupdates in place, so I think it's easier to install and upgrade than if you got it from a .deb.

(Chrome's .deb includes configuration to add Chrome's apt repository; I'm not sure if Firefox's does.)

i hide my Tars in a ~/.opt/ directory, because i dont want to mess with root owned dirs but i also dont want an ugly home directory. as well, i prefer the tars bc the updates are fast and in the background, and get updated faster then packages.

Rather than a .deb, provide a PPA.

Dunno whether the Debian/Ubuntu team does anything with the packages, but on Fedora at least, the Firefox RPM usually gets held for a few days so that the Fedora QA team can do their own testing before releasing the package to the public.

For 95% of users "just leave your Firefox alone you'll get an update in a day or two" is fine.

Out of curiosity, don't most systems that use .deb files already have Firefox in the package manager? I was under the impression that Debian now has mainline Firefox (instead of Iceweasel) as of a few years ago

Yes, but if you’re not running either the most recent version of a Debian-based OS, you either have to hope there’s a version in the backports repo or potentially break your installation through a diet-upgrade.

Getting the version from the vendor can be more ideal, since there’s no dependency on one party to keep another party’s software up to date, especially where distribution versions are concerned.

This would not get automatic updates and would be bad for security.

I recently made the transition back to Firefox too, like a lot of other folks in here it seems. Containers makes working with all my AWS much easier, and the containers isolating Facebook are great.

One problem though, that I can't solve, is that every once in a while I want to log in with Facebook, like for AirBnB. But I can't, because the cookie only lives in the Facebook container, but I can't add AirBnB as a hostname to the Facebook container.

Has anyone solved this?

Edit: I just solved this. You have to disable the built in Facebook Container extension and then it works as expected.

If you use the Multi-Account Containers extension, you can set AirBnB to always open in the "Facebook" container so it'd have access to your Facebook cookies.

I do use that extension, but it specifically blocks you from adding new domains to the Facebook container, which is built into Firefox. I can't figure out how to turn off that built in one and use the multi-account one instead.

> I can't figure out how to turn off that built in one

I don't see the facebook container to be built-in. I have only the multi-account container extension installed, and I can make any website to open by default in the container I have created for facebook.

I think, you will have to uninstall/disable the facebook-container extension, and just have the multi-account container extension enabled.

FB container - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

Multi-account container - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Would you happen to know how safe and separate the containers are?

Like, if I had a specific container used for Banking sites, would it be relatively safe from other containers?

Currently, I use Firefox for casual browsing and Chrome for email and financial related sites. But it would be nice to just use Firefox for both. I'm just worried it would be less safe.

From what I understand, every container has their own cookies and local storage, so it's like using a separate browser for every website.

Is there a way to configure Firefox so that a single-use container gets created when certain sites get visited, and discarded when they're closed?

I don't want to delete cookies by default (since I don't like to lose my shopping cart due to accidentally closing a tab in a shop I haven't used before), but I certainly would like to be able to ban sites that use cookies in a user-hostile manner from storing cookies permanently.

It would be even better if Mozilla used the voluntary telemetry + manual user feedback to decide which sites benefit from cookies (e.g. web shops), and applied this to everything else (e.g. news sites).

> I don't want to delete cookies by default

IIUC you want a container to be isolated to a single website, you have to create a container for that website, open the site in that container, and then click the multi-account container tab in the toolbar, and select to option to open this website in that container by default. From then on whenever you open the website, it gets opened in that container by default.

I just updated and immediately noticed two things that bothered me:

1. It added a new search engine (amazon.com.au) to my list that I'd culled down to just DuckDuckGo

2. It started recommending extensions for websites I visited

Maybe I'm overreacting a bit but why does it feel like every time I update anything recently I then have to spend 5 minutes going through the preferences to make sure it hasn't changed anything. It makes me hesitant to update any app when I feel like the developers are working against my interests.

I was annoyed about the recommending plugins thing as well. It's quick to turn off if that's any help.

No one mentioned WebP support yet! This is great news, Firefox will now feel faster on all the sites that use WebP. Safari is the last major browser to hold out.

What's so great about webp? I haven't heard about it. Is it one of those jpeg competitors? Because I did see a blog post recently that said none of the the things people are coming up with are more than marginally better despite jpeg's age.

I suspect those blog posts focused on photos.

However, WebP works well for a much larger range of image types[0]. It has lossless options with better compression than PNG (because PNG is incredibly simple compared to more recent image formats, in my opinion in a kind of beautiful way). And when compressing graphically simple illustrations with lossy settings, it can get much better results than JPG, both compression and quality wise.

Having said that, I still hope FLIF (or some descendant of it) will get some traction eventually[1].

[0] https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/png-vs-webp/

[1] http://flif.info/

In my experience, webps are smaller (25% - 50%) compared to their jpeg counterparts with same or similar levels of quality.

I love Firefox and use it all the time, but for the last few years one of my biggest pains is the OSX performance on my Macbook Pro. Is this close to be resolved soon?

It’s strange - I could have sworn that, for a while around where “quantum” was released, OS X performance was really quite good. I ditched it for chrome for a bit, and it even held up with my daily 20+ tabs.

What do you mean by performance? I’ve found Firefox to be generally faster than Safari and Chrome on my MacBook Pro. I generally find it to be more energy efficient than Chrome, but Safari is still king there.

This is personal experience, no lab tests, etc.

I wonder if this is due to not using the native compositor which they are looking at fixing this year.

See "Adding support for native OS compositors to WebRender" at https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html

Are you using a non-native display resolution? That seems to be the common factor for people who have significant problems.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

A scaled resolution is now default on most MacBooks. I haven't noticed battery problems but certainly seen RAM usage at least double that of Chrome and considerably above Safari.

If you are worried about battery performance, I can personally attest that Firefox is better than chrome in terms of battery performance.

Still Safari is the best in terms of battery endurance (its a VERY SIGNIFICANT difference). But then again its Safari, so you have to decide whether you want a capable browser (FF/Chrome) or a battery efficient one.

In my personal experience, other than Apple crippling the extension feature by moving them over to the App Store, Safari is a pretty damn capable browser. It's actually been rather interesting to see drastical improvements in it yearly, even the Mojave build's come with a serious performance boost. Firefox overall feels a lot slower than Safari with some exceptions. The only major killer feature I've noticed is the Devtools on FF.

IMO Safari is a very capable browser. I switched to it long ago and found I didn't miss anything from Chrome. Experimenting with Firefox now because I love the containers feature, I hope we'll see it in Safari some day.

Safari is my main browser when I am not working with frontend stuff and it's perfectly fine.

Regarding the other replies, I believe that Firefox is extremely slow in OS X only if you use a scaled resolution.

That seems to be a known issue, but for some reason it's taking a long time to be solved.

Scaled resolution is default on most/all retina MacBooks which is unfortunate.

For me it is only slow if I go outside the default scaled resolution. On my 2015 13" mbp I use the default scaled resolution to get around the performance issues.

Another work around if you want to use a non-default scaled resolution with firefox is to use firefox in non retina mode. I prefer not to use this as it makes the experience blurry.

I do wish they would fix this issue though.

Oh ok, great. For me the default scaled works best visually and I don’t use an external monitor so glad I won’t have this issue.

With the handoff working too I’m downloading tonight to give FF a fair shake.

Had this issue... until this version! I'm using MBP 15 inch with Firefox 65 (Beta channel), it doesn't use as much CPU as it did before, and it doesn't suck up all battery. This is on scaled resolution of 1920x1200.

Try Firefox Nightly. Runs super smooth on my Mac, and I think WebRender is what solves this for many people.

It's definitely much improved in the last few versions (64/65). Probably still quite power hungry, but it's not making my fans spin up anymore...

It feels slow because UI is not native. Chrome, Safari, Opera have native UIs on macOS. I mean they are rendered by macOS instead of browser engine. You get 60 fps for every action which doesn't happen with Firefox. Maybe they should use a process just to render the UI.

I feel like I've been waiting a long time for autoplay blocking - does this keep being pushed back or have I missed a feature cancellation/config setting/extension announcement?

I was hoping to see this pushed out by default because I agree that it's the best 'new' feature I've found in the browser in some time. You can change it in about:config, searching for 'media.autoplay'. I've changed the following:

1) Set 'ask permission' to true

2) Set 'block webaudio' to true

3) Set default to 2, which is 'ask per domain'. As I understand, the default of 0 is 'autoplay', 1 is 'block' and 2 is 'ask' but your favourite search engine of choice can provide clarification on this and the other settings. 2 will cause a pop-up beside the URL bar, like with password save popups, letting you accept or block and with a checkbox to set it permanent.

Why don't they write it as Block, Ask, Allow? Much easier this way.

I’m sure pull requests or bug reports are welcome from Mozilla if you feel strongly about it.

Apparently, setting both “ask-permission” and “enabled.user-gestures-needed” to true then enables a setting in the privacy area of settings to have a dropdown box with these options. I’m guessing it maps to the 0/1/2 setting I mentioned earlier

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033

Thanks! I also found this page with a bit more info on the settings:

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxMediaAut...

I changed all the media.autoplay settings from the default except block-event.enabled, with default set to 1. With that it seems to do what I want. I'm not sure if the strange media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground behavior described in the comment is still happening but I set that to false also.

Thank you for this, this makes me happy. I always forget to occasionally explore the about:config after a few updates.

Thank you!

Switched to Firefox from Chrome a month ago and my only regret was not being able to control autoplay audio.

This. I switched to FF 20 years ago because of the popup killer. Autoplay is the new popup.

Ok sorry it wasn't 20 years but something like like 15-12 but anyway it was a long time ago folks !

We implemented 2 versions ago, however we wanted to do some user testing to make sure it wasnt going to break too many websites and annoy too many users (We ended up changing the behaviour based on those tests).

It will ship and be enabled by default in Firefox 66, it will not have a whitelist of allowed websites but autoplay on all websites will be disabled by default (configurable obviously), if autoplay is blocked there will be a small notification in the url bar to tell you and give you the chance to enable it for that site only if you so wish

As a quick side note, I just want to throw out how grateful I am both as a developer and as a user that Firefox handled autoplay blocking in a sane way.

- An actual notification the user can see and control, which means as a developer I can give people an easy way to re-enable audio if something breaks.

- Actual user controls instead of an opaque algorithm I can't override that randomly decides for me on the fly whether or not I want to hear something played.

- No default whitelist, which means when I turn it off, it actually turns off everywhere, and I don't have to spend a week wondering if the next link I click on is just going to start autoplaying anyway because the site is popular.

It still boggles my mind that Chromium's policy is to just turn autoplay back on if you navigate to a new page on the same domain. It makes the entire feature worthless, it's like they assume the only way users are ever going to visit websites is from a search page or social links.

I don't think Firefox's policy is perfect -- user gestures are interpreted so broadly that they're incredibly easy to abuse[0], and I fully expect websites to start widely abusing them in the future. And the UI for adding exceptions is still really cumbersome -- as a developer I wish there was some way to whitelist domains from the notification bar without going into settings.

But all of this is just quibbles, the implementation is fine. It's just so much more straightforward and logical than what Chromium is doing. I'm at the point where I'm just really happy that Firefox is still rolling out features with predictable behaviors that feel, for lack of a better word, sensible.

I feel like increasingly where features like this are concerned, Firefox is the adult in the room, and for whatever it's worth, I really appreciate y'all being there. Seriously, I hope that everyone on the Firefox team feels good about themselves when they go home at night. I think you're doing good work.

[0]: https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/

Cheers, that very nice to hear

    > And the UI for adding exceptions is still really 
    > cumbersome -- as a developer I wish there was some 
    > way to whitelist domains from the notification bar 
    > without going into settings.

That was implemented last week :) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1517526 you should see it in nightly, and will be part of the release.

If you want to try it out today you can use Firefox Developer Edition [0]! I use it as my daily-driver and rarely encounter any kind of issue.

This is the documentation for the feature: Allow or block media autoplay in Firefox [1].

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay

I see it's available on Firefox Mobile (Android) under Settings → Advanced → Media → Allow autoplay.

I've found this plugin works well. By default nothing autoplays, but I can whitelist websites.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/disable-autop...

It's still hidden under about:config -- I've set media.autoplay.default to 2 and it'll prompt me if I want allow the playback.

Is there any news on Wayland support? I had read here previously that Firefox 65 was when support was going to be available by default[0] but there are no references in the release notes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657960

It's opt-in at runtime. https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506

And because that can cause problems when spawning third party applications from Firefox, there's another environment variable to opt-in in last nightly: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780

They finally implemented globalThis [0]! It's not a huge or complex feature, but it's been something I've been wanting for a long time. Now there's a portable way to access the global object. I would've preferred `global`, but that broke web compatibility which made it a non-starter.

I just checked and was a bit sad to find that the latest version of node still doesn't support it. This is a bit surprising as globalThis is already supported in Chrome.

[0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global

I would love to switch to Firefox but it still lacks -

* Per-site JavaScript controls (which Chrome has)

* Pinch to zoom (on macOS)

* Customisable keyboard shortcuts for Add-ons (which Chrome has)

* No elastic scroll (bounce effect) (which Chrome has)

I stick with Chrome as it works how I want it to although I find myself using Safari now and then but Safari's extensions are pretty crap in comparison to Chromes.

Customizable keyboard shortcuts for extensions just landed in nightly last week. Expect it soon.

Well god damn! I had no idea. Thank you for replying :)

>Per-site JavaScript controls

It has, but lacks UI.

But extensions (uBO/uMatrix) do that (and more) way better.

Smooth pinch to zoom is in development but until it's done I've made an add-on for it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-z...

> * Pinch to zoom (on macOS)

And Windows!

I wish Mozilla started to compete with Google on ChromeOS. Just make it the browser and leverage containers to keep things locked down. There’s a total business here and Mozilla could make it happen, without the entanglements of the ads business. Real missed opportunity to help promote open standards at the services level as well.

They had FirefoxOS remember? Doubt think they'll want to do it again soon.

A relevant recent article: https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec3...

I think the intended market for FirefoxOS was pretty different than ChromeOS. Wasn't FirefoxOS for low-powered phones? ChromeOS is designed around a "streamlined" laptop system.

Yeah, FFOS essentially had the SteamOS problem - targeting a market that didn't have any 'wedge' users in their existing demographics. For Firefox OS and Steam OS to take off you needed to buy new hardware and the people most on board with this already had hardware and didn't have a use case for buying more (low end phone for Firefox, PC-as-a-console for SteamOS). In either case there was a small pool of first movers and then almost no early adopters. This was pretty stark in the steam case as Linux usage, sales and games rose considerably but hardware sales were pretty thin.

Schools. Schools would be pretty motivated to drop Google because Google is an ads company.

Schools love chrome books and gsuite, but struggle with trusting an add company.

If they refactored Firefox OS to be a ChromeBook competitor, sure. They heavily marketed their phones to the developing world markets.

I may be wrong, but I have a suspicion that Chromebooks only got a foot in the door in the education sector because they had such a large marketing machine behind it. I wouldn't mind betting money that Firefox wouldn't be able to get an equivalent foothold (even comparable to their browser market share right now with like-for-like hardware and form factors) just because their exposure for any given initiative is a fraction of what Google can summon.

I'm kind of surprised no one has put something like this together as a hobby project. Just make a custom version of Debian which autoboots Firefox...

Yeah, I've been saying that for years, but I think it's too late for that. Now that ChromeOS supports Android and Linux apps, I don't see how Mozilla could seriously compete against that. Chrome OS is also heavily tied to Google's services, which are quite good.

Ecosystem is everything.

Huge props to the Mozilla crew. Firefox has been an awesome browser and I'm thankful for their product.

My only major gripe is video sort of sucks in it, especially when I'm on my laptop.

I'm glad we're starting to see AV1 rolling out in places. Full support can't come soon enough. Last year at NAB everyone was saying it's about 2 years out from solid support. 2020 should be a good year. AV1 looks pretty promising.

I'm very happy with the wayland performance in this release. XWayland looks really bad with sway on a HiDPI display, and previous to this release, firefox wayland was too slow to be usable.

That's no longer true. I'm giddy with how clear everything looks and how fast it is. This is a huge deal for me.

At the risk of a downvote storm, a few months ago I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox until I had a call of two hours via Google Hangouts and Firefox started to degrade the voice until a point of no return. I don't know if this is common in very demanding "web apps".

it's common on google apps ;)

Blame Google, not Mozilla. They're doing it on purpose and it's the main reason why more people should make the switch now before it's too late and nothing else works with Google's stuff but Chrome:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-...

Google intends to kill Hangouts by the end of the year anyway:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-...

I don't have any proof for this, but I think everything I've seen about Google's Invoice was also meant to kill the open email standards by convincing everyone that the proprietary "AI-enhanced" features of Invoice were worth it over interoperability with other email providers.

Thank goodness that app failed. They're still trying to do it through Gmail now, but it's going to be a much slower process and hopefully people will have enough time to catch on to them before it's too late.

Google is becoming a monopoly in the classical "evil company" sense - a monopoly that's no different than any other monopoly in the past, and that will try to exploit the users and kill competition in the same way others have done it before. More people should start to seriously consider this before going more "all-in" with Google than they already have.

> I don't have any proof for this

That sums it up nicely.

For whatever reason (I hope not nefarious) Google apps perform horribly on FF.

I actually do suspect it's intentional, but have no way to really prove it.

I keep an instance of Chrome running just for Google apps and use Firefox was everything else.

I've noticed the same sort of "degradation" when having large PDFs open as well. I have to refresh the "page" (the PDF) to be able to search for something and find that something that I know is in the PDF. Small F5 issue once you know about it cause it remembers where you are in the PDF.

My guess is RAM management/garbage collection going on in the background that needs to whitelist a few things or have some additional fancy stuff going on to not allow for memory leaks but allow for 2 hour phone calls and searchable PDFs after they've been open for some time (and possibly with a 10+ tabs open).

Definitely file a bug. I would imagine both these issues are known about and have a similar root cause.

I love Firefox otherwise.

Once Google finishes killing off Hangouts, maybe you can give it another try. Google has no incentive to fix performance issues for competitor browsers in a product that is end-of-life.

Is there any progress with GPU accelerated video decoding / encoding in the Linux version? Now that WebRender is in place it should be possible?

Without it, any WebRTC video conferencing applications are very CPU heavy, which cripples them on laptops especially.

I don't think WebRender has anything to do with accelerated video decoding.

Here's the bug btw: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727

WebRender seems to be a prerequisite for it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206

> The GPU->GPU copy is only usable if you also have hardware accelerated composition.

I thought WebRender is implementing such compositor.

It is, but there was also another one in Firefox (you could enable it on Linux by setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true).

I suppose they didn't want to actively work on such features for something that's going to be deprecated. Since WebRender is their way forward, they can as well implement video acceleration together with it.

>Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart).

To whoever is responsible for pushing this change through: Thank you.

Yes, it is much appreciated.

Can't tell you how many times my finger has slipped and hit Ctrl+Q instead of Ctrl+W.

Oh well! I didn't need all that work...

So you can't get it back? I usually use Chrome, I never lose my session no matter what I slip up to do.

Thanks for the downvote, whomever. I always consider switching to Firefox, as I think Chrome needs competition, but Firefox has just never been up to par in usability (especially developer usability) whenever I've tried to switch. Things like "losing your work" for no good reason (don't Firefox have "Re-open closed Window"?) is just another thing I would add to the list of reasons not to switch, so feel free to clarify.

To quote from the initial comment:

> (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart).

It also already has an optional check if you want to close a window ("you're closing a window with 10 tabs. sure?"), and a list of recently closed windows to restore.

I interpreted the change as if it would always show the quit warning regardless of any settings, since the warning popup is not exactly a new feature. Some more context helped clarify.

Well, if I were, say, typing up a forum post, that would be lost. More often, however, I simply lose all my tabs. Which are not impossible to restore, given Firefox's "Restore Previous Session" button. But since I have the Cookie AutoDelete extension[0], all my sites get logged out. So I have to re-authenticate with my password manager, log back into all the sites, half of which require me to pull out my 2FA token...

It only takes about a minute total to get back up and running on everything. It's just a nuisance when it happens.

[0]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

Did they remove ctrl + shift + t to reopen a closed tab?

C-q closes the window, not the tab.

There's also a shortcut for re-opening the last closed window(s). Though I don't recall if it works in a Private Browsing window.

No, C-shift-w closes the window. C-q Quits the application, meaning it would close all of your Windows. And if the entire application closes, a hotkey to bring the window back won't work. That's why it's so frustrating when I click it by accident.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...

Will this halt shutdown as well? If so, I hope this is configurable...

For context: Firefox 64 removed `browser.showQuitWarning`, which would show a dialog asking "cancel"/"save session"/"discard session" when you quit.

Hopefully this is easy to disable

It is, there is an option for it in the Preferences pane right under "Restore previous session".

Chrome's "hold cmd-Q to quit" popup is just about perfect in that regard.

I'm hearing about this feature for the first time - and I frequent HN and other tech sites!

For pop ups, automatic or it doesn't exist.

I hate that thing! Is there a way to switch it off? (I get it, it can be useful. It's my personal preference, and showing it is a sane default. Less intrusive than a (modal) pop-up for sure. But I like software which I can set up to my liking.)

It's in the 'Chrome' menu. 'Warn before quitting'.

Ah, thanks. I use firefox as my daily driver, but go to chrome for some web pages anyway.

I really wish this was standard across all apps on macOS. It's beautiful UX, and easily discoverable.

It's not accessible. Applications that are meant to be used by the general public should avoid making assumptions about how the user presses keys. Specifically some users with motor impairment may find this kind of "long-press UX" to be troublesome.

Note that it still won't warn you if you have the "Warn you when closing multiple tabs" options unchecked.

Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502908#c68

> We don't intend to add a third, separate pref/warning for people who do want to have a quit warning, don't turn on session restore, and don't want warnings when closing windows / multiple tabs (ie making browser.tabs.warnOnClose = false + no automatic session restore + browser.warnOnQuit = true show a dialog is not something we're interested in doing.

FWIW I don't get any warning when closing multiple tabs (through tree style tabs), have session restore turned on, and do get a warning when closing the window.

It's because you have session restore enabled. In my case, I don't want session restore or a warning when closing multiple tabs. I only want a warning when closing the browser. But that is not what they fixed here.

Fantastic product, excellent release.

Just a little complain if website team reads this. Being on main landing page[0] there is no way to find out which version of Firefox is currently the latest.

0. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Is it just me, or the font used by FF is changed on OSX? It's a bit crispier and it's not antialiased

yeah it is like everything bolded... not just in the menubar, but I think the rendering of webpages is affected too. I feel like I am on a Windows machine. ️

Are you on macOS Mojave?

If yes, it could be because Firefox started honoring the system font settings of Mojave [1].

Enabling font smoothing in System Preferences now results in slighlty bolder fonts, and grayscale font smoothing. Firefox and Chrome needed some time to adjust to these settings, but now have the same rendering than the rest of the system.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495282

Yes, on latest Mojave. Thanks for the heads up, did not know that FF just started supporting the Mac settings

Fonts are much beefier for me on OS X. Here is a side by side of Chrome looking at the same PR.

https://i.imgur.com/U5eQdqZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/wHKa4Zu.png

Edit: This made a difference for me, but it's also changed the feel of every UI element on my mac. I think it's a net win but will take getting used to: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aj3p2v/fonts_too_b...

tl;dr - disable 'use font smoothing when available' in system preferences. After killing and restarting Firefox everything looks normal.

As @kemenaran mentioned, FF started to respect Mac settings. It's a bit weird, but I can get used to it.

Does anyone know what the decoding performance of AV1 is these days? I'd love to play with it, but back when I last tried my oldish laptop did NOT like decoding it.

dav1d is the state of the art currently, but i dont know if it's used by FF.

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d

It is, however it's not enabled by default for now. It will be in a few releases after we figure about a couple issues with the build system.

For people that would like to follow along from home, here's the Firefox bug for switching to the dav1d decoder:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=dav1d

I have tried AV1 video on Chrome and it seems to be using the same amount of CPU as VP9 on my computer.

I can't test Firefox support for AV1 on my Mac, because it seems to work only on Windows.

It's only on windows by default, but you can enable it using about:config flag media.av1.enabled

I've been running with AV1 enabled on Linux (via about:config) for a while - maybe flipping the pref will work for you?

Still waiting for vimperator so I can use browser like I used to use only 2 years back.

Tridactyl is good but no :map, no :js and alphabets instead of numbers for links.

Have you tried Vimium?

No I have not- I think they were not trying for full vimperator compatibility and now your sibling comment has informed me that tridactyl is already close. So I probably won't try to switch... :)

When did you last look at Tridactyl?

- :js is there

- You can have numbers with :set hintstyle numeric

- You can have Vimperator style link filtering with :set hintfiltermode vimperator

- There's no map (and probably never will be), but you can bind sequences of keys to "ex-commands", which is probably 99% of what you want, e.g, :bind <C-b>t open google what time is it

The main problem I have with Tridactyl is that it's pretty janky at the moment.

You're godsent- `:js` is there now and it works!

I tried `:set hintstyle numeric` and the command was accepted but it didn't work. Same for `hintfiltermode`. But that they exist means I it's probably me doing something wrong.

I couldn't get bind to work the way I wanted- I typed `:` followed by `bind w :tabnext<CR>` but that didn't work.

Also, C-i for opening vim on textareas and C-c for cancelling a page load don't work either.

I'm beginning to think though that "all" stuff already there, it just works differently (JS wasn't there when I tried a few months back) so I just need to re-read the documentation and not expect everything to work "exactly" like vimperator.

Thank you so much! You've changed my life (partially :))

We don't have much validation on `set` - people can use it to make their own settings if they want - so just because it was accepted doesn't mean that it worked in the way you thought it would...

In this case it's because I misremembered the setting. You want `:set hintnames numeric` instead : )

Regarding bind: as I said, it maps sequences of keys to an ex-command. Your attempt is a sequence of keys to a sequence of keys. The correct invocation is `bind w tabnext`.

We left ctrl-c unbound so it could be used for copy, not least because I know it would annoy the hell out of me. You can rebind it with `bind <C-c> stop`, but because we only have access to pages after they've loaded a bit, it might not quite work as often as you'd like.

Ctrl-I will only work if you have `:native` installed, and, if you're on OSX, an editor I thought to add, which I think might just be MacVim. I'd hope it would give you errors if any of the above was untrue...

We definitely aren't at feature parity with Vimperator. Some stuff Mozilla just won't let us do (e.g, emenu), other stuff we can do but haven't got around to it yet (accepting keyboard input on privileged pages - we have preliminary approval for extending WebExtensions).

I'm glad I could help. There's `:tutor` which is fairly short and probably the most user-friendly way of digesting general information, and there's `:help` if you fancy a very dry novella; there's also somewhat hidden help pages for settings and commands for use in insert/ex mode, the latter of which I can't remember how to access. I think there's a link hidden on the main help page.

Thank you. Your using `we` made me go to github contributors and sure enough you were one of the top guys :)

I guess with the right `hintnames` and `:bind w tabnext` working I am 95% of the way already.

Couple of things if I don't come across as ungrateul-- :nativeinstall didn't work for me, so I manually did the (seemingly risky) step. :native now shows 0.1.10 installed but C-i doesn't yet work. I'll look around and post back. I am on Linux.

I tried binding C-c but it doesn't seem to work as you guessed. Also- how about using C-z for stop once you have imap and nmap working? Because you're right C-c could get annoying but `stop` is an oft-used feature too.

About feature parity- vimperator also gave you `readline` style C-a, C-e C-w in text-fields.

I'm going to read the hell out of the tutor and help as soon as I get some time. Vimperator (now Tridactyl!) means a lot to me since it makes me much more productive.

What do you mean by the manual step for nativeinstall? It is risky if you don't trust us, which is why Mozilla won't let us do it automatically, so it has to be manual.

What do you mean by imap and nmap? We already have separate binds for normal and insert mode (which is why you can type into text boxes ;) ). I think Ctrl-Z was bound to ignore mode in Pentadactyl. Now I think about it, I don't know why it isn't bound to ignore mode; I should probably do that. Anyway, `stop` is just fundamentally broken at the moment because we can't access the page until it loads a bit. It is bound to `x` by default.

We actually have most of the readline binds. They're hidden away on the help page - if you look at the third paragraph "text areas that can be found here" - but we left them unbound by default because I don't use them and we can't rebind ctrl-w. I don't want to train people that we have readline binds and make them close tabs that they're editing text in :)

As for your editor - I don't know why it isn't working without more information. Feel free to file an issue on GitHub. (For the avoidance of doubt - you need to have a text box focused to use it - I know it sounds silly but it has come up before).

You don't sound ungrateful - Tridactyl is complicated, has weird defaults, and is badly documented.

Sorry i immediately set editorcmd but the edit was for some reason posted as a sibling comment that I then deleted.(I couldn't reply immediately afterwards because this website didn't have a reply button for your comment then)

Maybe ZZ could be stop then?

ZZ closes all your tabs and windows. `viewconfig nmaps` will show you all the normal mode binds, if you're curious.

I'm reasonably happy with "x" for stop.

Chrome has a very annoying (and somewhat severe) Japanese input issue on Linux and pretty much forced me to use Firefox.[0] But I do like Firefox from feature perspectives, too.

[0]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=681389

Once read that Firefox is working on a Chrome-like language translation feature. Anyone know when it'll be done?

The other day I found out that live bookmarks can still be made to work in Firefox 64, in a way:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/advckx/live_boomar...

Not sure if the same applies to 65, but it might help someone...

I really like Firefox containers. Having different containers for each of Google, Google G Suite, Hacker News, Twitter, and Reddit lets me have one browser open and keep cookies separate.

I started using Firefox again when I got a new Linux laptop last December (from Sytem76 - love it). After getting used to having containers, then I started also using Firefox again on my MacBook.

The energy usage in the task manager doesn't seem to be very accurate.

I tested by opening a new window with a cpu-intensive webpage (http://www.digitalattackmap.com). Real CPU usage jumps all the way up, but energy usage in the task manager is still showing low. Why?

I'm hoping it will be less crashy than the last three or four releases. But they don't say so in the announcement...

Does anybody know whether we get to blame Servo for the crashiness? Rust code is supposed to be "safe", but that never really pans out in industrial use; maturity is a better predictor of stability.

I'd love to switch over to Firefox, but I'm used to Chrome's developer toolkit. I understand it thoroughly and can use it proficiently.

Any insight as to the comparison between the state of FF's developer tools and Chrome's would be appreciated. I'd love to be convinced to switch.

I don't use Chrome or its developer tools, but I do use Firefox's. They work well for my needs, because I can inspect network requests, including editing and re-sending them, and I can debug JS.

Wait, how do you edit/resend a network request?

Using the network inspector, there's a button when you click on a specific request to edit and resend it.

Here's a SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28775346

Thank you! This is my new killer feature!

> Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart).

Excellent! The number of times I've accidentally hit ctrl+q instead of ctrl+w and then had to relaunch firefox and restore my session - this will be a welcome relief.

This stopped happening to me once I moved to Dvorak.

Anyone else had a problem with AMP on Android with Firefox set as the default browser? Tapping on AMP search results from a Google search resulted in a blank page and a never-ending progress bar.

Installing the "Redirect AMP to HTML" plugin sort of solves the issues but adds a delay.

I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I've only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?

HN users are just natural grumblers. Firefox is very fast these days.

I've only seen people complain about WebRender on Mac. Looks like the cause is known and looking to be fixed this year [1].

[1] See "Adding support for native OS compositors to WebRender" on https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html

Firefox is fantastic! But I have noticed a similar trend with Firefox getting negative comments.

One particular reason might be that HN has a lot of current and former Google employees on it, and they are pretty vocal and actively defend Google and downvote everything else - I have experienced this multiple times when bringing up anything negative about Chrome - which is really not that great of a browser. Especially the security (look at past number of patches) and memory usage is bad. I'm not sure why the community here speaks so highly about it.

I personally find the opposite, where it is usually Mozilla fans bashing Chrome. Mozilla doesn't have any better record when it comes to security. I still have access to all my favorite privacy extensions within Chromium. I also find the performance on Linux (Arch with VAAPI) for Chromium to be much better than Firefox.

I can't compare to Chrome since I haven't really used it for over 10 years, but Firefox for me is fast enough.

The main issue is still memory usage IMO. The way they implemented multiprocess browsing was to have a few long-lived processes rather than one per tab. Over time these processes tend to use a lot of memory, as scripts invariably seem to leak.

But, if I interpret the memes correctly Chrome isn't exactly frugal either.

There's a new CSS engine: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en... but the new compositor, WebRender, has not been enabled yet (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311790). I believe it will be enabled for Windows users in version 67.

Initially, we'll only enable it for users on Windows+Nvidia, to minimize the risk of regressing stability (GPU drivers is a fun minefield). Then we'll gradually extend the scope and focus on other drivers and platforms.

Nah, Quantum is fast. People are mostly complaining about some Mozilla management decisions, rather than technical ones.

I think many people are still angry about losing their extensions and not having capable apis to be able to replace them.

No, Firefox has become faster and overall better. But there was a price paid, and not much gain in other terms. Extensions were lost and Mozilla still didn't deliver important APIs which people wait for over 2 years now. Number of users didn't really grow yet. New Engine also has still several problems. And the important android-version didn't receive the update as many people anticipated. There were also some privacy-related scandals from Mozilla, which seems to have eaten most of the shaky progress from that time.

Overall, still many reasons for people to be grumpy.

My experience has been very positive. I recently noticed that Firefox had become slightly slow to recover my session at start-up. I investigated and found I had over 1800 tabs open. With a few hundred tabs open start-up is amazingly fast. I never even think about performance otherwise because it has ceased to be an issue.

The new rendering engine (WebRender aka Quantum Render) it not yet on by default. And at first it will be only enabled on Windows.

Here is the tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386669

works fine on desktop, but it's unusable on android constant crashes, jumpy cursor or repeated words in text field, jittery scrolling, slow loading of pages and don't get me started on pull down to refresh ignored for years, because apparently giving users options it's against Firefox philosophy

Downloaded Firefox 65 (Windows) and quickly loaded a web page... and still no pinch zoom. :-(

I hope macOS & Windows Firefox will get pinch zoom soon, so that I can finally switch from Chrome.

Firefox seems to have good performance and user-centric features & functionality.

there is a capable extension for that https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom

Could any seniors give more information on what do they mean by this firefox update: A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1?

AV1 is a new video codec, produced by the Alliance for Open Media.

AOM is a consortium of browser vendors, content producers, streaming platforms, teleconference providers, hardware companies, and others to produce a state of the art, efficient codec that's also free of the outright extortion that comes with patents on codecs from MPEG (like H.264 and H.265).

The blog post linked from the release notes has some more information about AV1:

https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/mozilla-celebrates-release-o...

I hope someday we'll see Duck Duck Go partner with Firefox as the default engine.

This is the case on Linux Mint. I can't even set Google as a search provider if I wanted to! Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results, and they kinda suck.

> Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results

Do you have any source for this claim?

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."

Tangential, but has anyone here figured out how to get menu copy and paste working in Firefox on webapps such as Google Docs?

I've tried suggestions such as changing the dom.clipboard settings in about:config, but that doesn't help.

How do the new privacy blocker settings interfere or conflict with uBlock?

You mean the enhanced tracking protection? There's no interference or conflict with uBlock.

It can at least be confusing and there might be conflicts. I'd recommend turning off the built in tracking protection if using other tracking.

They might have fixed the particular issue, but at one point I had stupidly enabled "strict" tracking protection and used that with uMatrix and found that it broke something major (I forget what, maybe reCaptcha) even when the internal tracking was disabled on a per-site basis. Very confusing and unnecessary to have the internal tracking protection if you already use a blocker.

Happy with a lot of stuff 65 introduced (this is a nice trend in a lot of recent Firefox releases)

One thing I'm not happy about; opted-in recommendations for addons when you browse websites.

Handoff on macOS, finally! \o/

Just tested opening Firefox on iOS, and the "Open page in Firefox" pops up in the Dock of my Mac. Neat.

(It is advertised as also working with Mobile Safari.)

Does any of this work with Firefox on Windows/Linux? It would be nice to have this kind of syncing across all platforms.

Committed FF user after finding you can stop auto playing HTML5 videos without the need for an extension.

Plus: Google’s auto-login debacle which precipitated the move.

Any big reasons to up date to this over the ESR release (60)? So far it seems like mostly minor updates since then or did I miss something?

Anybody else seeing blurry text for the bookmark toolbar and background tab titles? macOS 10.14 on an external monitor.

Hmm, looks like it only happens with dark theme enabled, it looks ok in light mode.

Darn was hoping for default urls for containers. so when you open a container the tab will open a specific url also.

Finally it seems the performance issues on macbook pro with retina display have been solved, at least for me!

The hard-coded alt+# for switching to numbered tabs is a deal breaker for me. I wish it wasn't but I have ingrained ctrl+# for switching and alt+# is used for my window manager. I accept I'm in a minority, but it seems like a strange design decision for an open browser.

What would it take for firefox to support Gmail's offline mode?

Is there any decent mouse gesture solution yet?

Is per site autoplay control still not available?

I wish I could revert. 65 regressed and the tabs are back above the address bar.

Firefox has placed tabs above the address bar by default for almost 10 years. Addresses are specific to (inside of/"below") tabs, so the default interface makes better sense.

A question regarding the advertisements they show on the home page: https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-boo...

Are these ads introduced with these updates, or does Firefox include a backdoor so the Mozilla Corporation can show whatever they want on your home page?

In addition to this:

Even though the link claims that it is not a paid placement, it's still an advertisement. If Mozilla really wants to provide more value to me, they'll tell me how to permanently disable it. Its presence provides negative value to me.

Of course they paid for it... Do you really think the Mozilla Corporation has sent an ad to millions of users for free? Whether that money went to the corporation or to the pocket of an executive, that's another matter.

Then the statement "It was not a paid placement or advertisement." is blatantly false. they simply say whether it was paid, not whether it was paid to a specific entity.

Read the statement more carefully:

> This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent.

It could be that they are knowingly making public statements which are untrue and will expose themselves to legal liability for that or it could be that the statement means exactly what it says and that Mozilla is experimenting with promotions for using Firefox which do not involve money changing hands, especially if they're just gauging interest to see whether people even click on those regions. The concert was definitely promoted as a “Thanks for using Firefox” deal so I would not be at all surprised to learn that Booking.com gave a modest discount as part of a deal where no money changed hands as per the statement.

> This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement.

I don't know about legal liability, but you don't really need to look further than this to know that Mozilla lied because these two statements are already inconsistent. "Offers provided by a partner" are advertisements. The quid pro quo in this case wasn't money, but rather a link on booking.com to download Firefox.

Or it can be a deal to see what returns the ad gets. If Mozilla is serious about selling ad space there, they're going to need case studies. In the early stages, that is something you would give away for free. Particularly because the ad providers are going to get a lot less data than they are accustomed to, you will need some case studies that show someone getting great returns on their ad spend even without tracking data.

Unless you can back up that statement with some kind of evidence, I'd say it looks awfully close to libel.

What.. Have you even used FF in the last decade? It comes with tracker and 3rd party cookie blocking built in. Your accusation is a bit of a stretch.

I guess you think I should use chrome? Because that has zero to do with serving me up more profitable advertising at all..

But aside from that, you do know you can disable everything on the home page under general preferences - including the ad section.

And worst case if they remove the option, ublock will still block it and if it can't you can just disable it's display in userChrome.css.

How is an accusation of it being an ad at all a stretch? It’s a placement offering a deal for a company, whether or not it was paid for. That seems to fit the definition of an ad to me.

Furthermore, I’m not sure where you got the idea that I am telling you to move to chrome or indeed do anything at all, given the comment to which you replied says “me” 3 times in it. I was quite evidently purely asking about my own situation.

Their argument, per the GP’s link, is that they want to provide their users additional value. This does not achieve that for me, hence I want to remove it.

I have not yet had a chance to upgrade and try to disable it, as I am not near my computer right now to upgrade to the latest release. Hence why I asked for them to provide a means of removing it. If that already exists, fantastic! It achieves precisely the outcome I’m after.

It's not in the latest release it's from a release or two ago so you probably already have it disabled.

But its not only ads they serve up, it's closer to the Google Now feed you see on chrome new tabs in android or Google now.

The accusation was that they're not adding value or in fact negating it. My complaint was that Google or alternatives don't do nearly as much as they could to ad value - so to call out Firefox like this just makes no sense.

I will mention they're pushing pocket hard and I think this sis the route they're going for monetary gains. It's gross but it's pretty easy to remove it all from context menus via user chrome CSS anyway.

I would suggest you consider this: with Microsoft moving Edge to chromium, there are now only 3 engines standing: Chromium, webkit, and gecko. Therefore Firefox is important to deny Google enormous control over the browser and therefore the internet.

Firefox desperately needs a revenue stream that is independent from Google. Although Google has not done so yet -- it's imo very valuable to Google to preserve the illusion of not having a browser monopoly -- a huge amount of their revenues come from their Google search deal. Google can, for example, cut that deal at any time: Firefox is selling into a monopsony.

I don't love advertising, but we need Firefox to have a non-google revenue source.

I completely understand the need for the Mozilla org to diversify its funding sources. If that’s the case, they should be honest and upfront with it. Come out and say that you want to try ad revenue, rather than this “giving back” nonsense. If Mozilla are honest about it then we as the Firefox community can have a more realistic conversation about what this means and how it’s best implemented.

Just to clarify Chromium (browser) uses Blink, which is a fork of Webkit. IMO the consolidation demonstrates the complexity involved.

The alternative is subscription. That hasn't fared too well traditionally in browser space for a few decades. Maybe the Brave approach might work, where a fraction goes to the browser vendor akin to a transaction fee?

Does the Mozilla foundation accept private donations? Even if they do, they clearly don't push it enough.

I have no idea if it would bring in enough revenue, but it would presumably help? I'd much prefer a Wikipedia-esque donation request on the new tab page than any of Mozilla's other partnerships.

> Does the Mozilla foundation accept private donations?

Try https://donate.mozilla.org/

They do, but donations are not put toward Firefox development.

Firefox as an organization does not get branding at all. They claim to be the champions on privacy and user freedom yet they keep breaking that image over and over again with unwanted ads, telemetry, and services you can't disable. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but I can't fathom how they come up with such poor decisions every single time.

Why do you still use it?

"Choose Firefox now, or later you won't have a choice"

https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-l...

Honestly that's a very poor rationale. People should be choosing Firefox because it's a better product or a more ethical one (sadly they are doing a poor job at convincing us of that), not because we need to keep a competitor alive forever no matter what.

I'll happily use a (marginally) inferior competitor because I value competition for its own sake. I use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Bing Maps.

Yes, you can do that. But if you want it to be sustainable, you can't use that kind of line to convince people at large. And note that until Firefox 57, Firefox was not "marginally" inferior, it was substantially inferior in a number of metrics. They have improved since then, but it took them a very long time - you can't expect users to wait forever for you.

If we can't expect educated, tech-savvy users on HN to take the long view and support Mozilla, then I guess you're saying the game is already lost.

We might as well just make our peace that the age of an open internet and general-purpose computing is coming to an end. In future, we'll enjoy AOL 2.0 access on our Google Home Terminal Appliances.

I was talking about "people at large", not HN users.

Since Quantum, I actually find it to be a better product.

Right now, it is both, it is a better product and a more ethical one.

If people will not use it for these reasons now, then they will not be able to use it in the future.

That's the argument, and it seems pretty straightforward to me.

> it is a better product

Maybe for you. For me, it's unuseable until they add hardware accelerated video decoding.

Regardless of the reason why, we're now reaping the fruits of Google's unchecked rampage across the browser space, what with Chromium/WebKit all but taking over. Mozilla continues to be starved for cash. Most Firefox users despise one of its only monetization strategies (selling advertisements). FF would be dead tomorrow if Yahoo (or whoever the default search engine is) pulled their funding. Mozilla is surrounded by rocks and hard places on all sides, what else can they do?

"Should be" doesn't get us anywhere. The rationale is sound, regardless of whether it should be.

For the lack of better alternatives (I need some specific extensions, and I don't want to use Chrome). I also use alternative browsers like qutebrowser but it cannot replace everything I need to do.

There is an extension called Chrome Store Foxified. It's like wine for Firefox. Check it out.

[..]This add-on has been discontinued. I am leaving it here because it still works in some versions of Firefox. Discontinue Notice and Discussion[..]

Source: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/chrome-store-fox...

The linked discussion makes the impression that they try to revive it.

Have you tried Brave? I'm really liking it.

Nope, I want no ads in my browsers and Brave does not interest me in that sense.

Firefox is being sabotaged from the executive level, I'm 100 % sure of this. Tech-wise, solid. Administration, a complete disaster.

Probably. It's pretty sad when you see something great stuck in a local minima because of "thinking heads" that know better.

They should bring back Brian Eich, things were better for the users when he was in charge.

He's running brave now

I have no idea if Brave is going to succeed at their goals, but they are the only ones trying to comprehensively change the model...I wish them success!

And Steve Jobs was running NeXT. And like NeXT, Brave doesn't really seem to be catching on...

From what I understand though, Eich has lost faith in Mozilla maintaining their own renderer, so if he came back to Mozilla it would probably coincide with Firefox becoming yet another chromium skin.

Mozilla is sticking with Gecko for now, and they do not need my faith to continue.

Brave is growing, has grown every month, not at over 5.5M MAU. I am not sure how to interpret "Brave doesn't seem to be catching on" as other than false. Firefox in 1H2004 was in a similar trendline. People then still said "IE for evar!"

1) That's not his name.

2) "Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

>"Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

I mean, if things really were better before, reverting to how they were sounds like a pretty good strategy. That's kind of a tautology.

Worked pretty swell for intel when netburst got out of hand and they backtracked. 10 years of market dominance followed.

Intel can't revert the market back 10 years, but the problem with Mozilla isn't its struggles with the market. If it is true that Mozilla's problem is compromised leadership, then it would make perfect sense to go back to independent leadership.

I don't think it was him in particular, it was just that firing him gave them the opportunity to replace him and his people with people more attuned to their agendas. It's the agendas that should change, the people would follow. They installed a new culture at the top that was more interested in using Firefox as a transitional way to burnish their resumés, and any semblance of core values disappeared in a tangle of projects that were branded as innovation and that everybody could sign. Meanwhile they've been in consistent negative growth in users that is actually starting to look insignificant because their entire userbase is now insignificant. I mean: losing 1%/month of the number of the users they have now seems like a rounding error compared to 1%/month of the users they had 5 years ago.

Anyway, they'll always be guaranteed at least 3% of the market from diehard anti-Google/Microsoft/closed-source users like me, and users from outside the US who are concerned by unaccountable US tech behemoths who are intimately intertwined with the government. With that 3%, they'll be able to fulfill their primary function of being something that Google can claim in an antitrust hearing keeps them from being a monopoly.

Exactly. And they still don't advertise a lot of the Firefox features outside of release notes. I mean REALLY advertise. Google used to have regular commercials with celebrities to advertise Chrome, and people are still somehow baffled that they're number one now? FOSS devs build some good software, but we're terrible at marketing.

Maybe if users were willing to pay for a browser, they wouldn't be so desperately scrambling around for non-Google revenue sources.

They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

Have they ever tried crowdfunding campaigns? I don't think so. Wikipedia seems to be doing fine with it. At least they should experiment with some ideas in that line and see what works.

And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Wikipedia has sufficient marketshare to survive despite that.

The ads that mozilla shows are fairly privacy-friendly, much more than any other ads you'd find on most websites. That's an improvement.

If you don't like them you can easily disable them.

I can't say that I like the wikipedia reminders, but I don't dislike them. They remind me to pay for a service I use daily. So I do and they don't remind for a while. It is fine.

>And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Users may not like nag screens, but I doubt they like the shitty ads Mozilla shows on the new tab page by default either. As long as the screen is easy to dismiss I don't see the problem.

Even easy to dismiss screens can disrupt the users flow similarly to how I mentioned that it interrupts my reading of the wikipedia page.

Wikipedia has, as mentioned, the market monopoly advantage so they can do as please, Firefox doesn't and can't afford to annoy users.

I would doubt users are more annoyed by ads, especially the type of ads that Mozilla uses, than nag screens.

> They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment! (I feel I need to add that caveat nowadays, since subscriptions are all the rage.)

> I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment!

The problem is that web browsers require some of the most intensive software maintenance of any software, ever. They're one of the most exposed attack surfaces to external security threats; and piles of new features are unfortunately getting continuously added to web standards, which need to be supported for compatibility reasons.

I think a one time tip-jar payment makes sense for a lot of software, but not for web browsers. I think a subscription-type contribution makes the most sense for them.

Put the money into a trust fund? I suppose I could do that on my end, but that's a little extreme from an effort point of view.

Subscriptions are just difficult to manage, I can't deal with individual recurring costs for so many pieces of software.

Maybe crowdfund API development for some of the 'power user' features, like live bookmarks or tree style tabs?

Why can't the community do this for themselves, without having to make Mozilla do everything?

You can disable the ads in the preferences. The telemetry can be mostly disabled there too, more if you use about:config. Pocket, which I assume is the service you mention, can also be disabled in about:config.

You can find more here: https://www.privacy-handbuch.de/handbuch_21u.htm

This user.js will disable most of the telemetry and other things: https://www.privacy-handbuch.de/download/minimal/user.js

So yes, you can disable these.

But it isn't by default, that is the issue

If telemetry was off by default, Mozilla would be blind to what the users are doing, to common sources of crashes and to what features are not being used.

Mozilla needs that information to be able to make a decision on where to focus.

Same for ads, default off ads defeats the entire purpose.

Mozilla is a privacy-aware and even -focused corporation and I will assume that the defaults of the browser are good for the common end user. Everything else may be configured.

mozilla needs to ask before collecting data. What is difficult about that?

They need to ask if they collect personal data as per GDPR or the US Data Privacy laws. If the data collected is not of private nature they don't need to ask.

Usage patterns can be granular enough to identify a user online, its easy enough to do that with machine learning nowadays. They have to ask anyway.

It doesn't send that granular enough of a usage pattern though, they have a group of people making sure that they data they collect cannot be used to identify someone.

The home / new tab page itself is local. The snippets at the bottom of the page are loaded from a Mozilla server.

I was so excited when Quantum was released. I used it exclusively and was happy with the performance.

Then Mozilla started back dooring ads and other promos and broke my trust.

I’ve since gone back to Chrome. At least there Google has the decency to make it obvious you’re being tracked, and with the new privacy controls I (hopefully correctly) feel like I can exercise some control.

Mozilla really needs to get right with their users.

> Are these ads introduced with these updates, or does Firefox include a backdoor so the Mozilla Corporation can show whatever they want on your home page?

The snippets are just a web page fragment fetched over HTTPS, AFAIK.

It's just like the new tab page in chrome on Android. But you can disable what content is shown in settings, including the ads.

Backdoor? Please.

How do you think Mozilla gets the money to pay their hundreds of developers?

The ads on their homepage are far more benign than their google search integration which pays hundreds of millions per year.

As far as I know, it's also personalized completely locally.

I don't see this on mine, but I modified the defaults a long time ago.. My new tab page just has a list of 10 (out of 16) sites I added there manually. 6 of those are services I run on my local network.

Hit the gear at the top right of your new tab page. Uncheck boxes you don't want.

Optionally, disable Pocket completely by going to about:config in address bar. Search for 'extensions.pocket.enabled' and double click to change value from true to false.

I think you missed the shift. It's all about internet openess now. Not sure the end user is still in the equation.

No changes to the interface again! Will not go back to FF till they take graphic design seriously.

curious, what changes do you want to see?

Here are my comments. There is too much color in the tab and bookmarks bars. It should fade with focus on the content. The icons are too contrasting, the outlive around the folders is too harsh. I don't think they changed the icons design in 10 years or more. I find his lack of aesthetic attention jarring. Same goes for navigation and settings interface.

What changes do you want to see? There's so little chrome left in the browser these days that I'm not sure what there is to design besides the appearance of tabs, which is easily customizable.

I'm also curious. What does Firefox do so much worse than Chrome, Safari, or IE? The interfaces of all four are more or less identical.

As a someone who works in the design industry, I appreciate it when ‘graphic design’ takes a backseat where my browser is concerned and they just let the UI merge as discretely with the OS interface as possible...

...and from here, that's exactly what it appears to be doing!

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