Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Another article on this: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/firefox-now-automatically-..., deduped from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432362.
While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening
I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...
How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results. Even though I disabled Cortana. Incredible.
1) Arrow
2) Arboles
3) Area
And then type another 'r' before you realize your result is there ("Arr") and as you go to select "Arrow" the auto-suggest results turn into
1) Array
2) Arrogant
3) Arrow
Like, how does adding the second 'r' make "Array" higher probability than "Arrow"?!
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...
Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.
Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.
Makes me wish there was some sort of an understanding that: The thing I just clicked was somewhere else within the last 400ms, so click on what used to be there."
If we could get this feature on mobile and desktop operating systems, I would be soo happy. I probably click/tap on something just before it moves about fifty times a day. Having the fastest devices only helps a little.
It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.
The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.
Super, super annoying!
I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard.
This has been my #1 gripe with web sites since pretty much the dawn of time. Finally!
That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.
The problem is mainly with ads, when 1) there may or may not be an ad available, and 2) you're allowing the ad height to be dynamic, to allow for greater possible inventory.
I believe opera 12 could do this?
The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit tab, and then type in a search query.
The most underrated and undermarketed to the average user Firefox feature.
In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs.
It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users....
On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life.
I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug.
Porn browsing, meanwhile, is much better done with a secondary dedicated Chrome profile.
That said now that I know banks have google analytics in them, I really wonder whether I'm better off trusting the extensions.......
I use little snitch on mac, and I still continue to get Firefox connect dialogs for private tabs long after they were closed.
Safari on mac does not exhibit that behavior.
This will be a big help for me. Makes me wonder how many more there are that are just too cumbersome to discover.
I use the first 3, they compound too (in a slightly strange way, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire..., see last few paras.).
It's important that you type them AFTER the thing to search for, not before.
For example, `mytag +` instead of `+ mytag`.
I found that quite surprising.
TL;DR:
Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged.
Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
Add # to search for matches in page titles.
Add $ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
Add ? to search for matches in suggestions.
I think that Google sites must not be thoroughly tested on firefox though! Vanilla Gmail (no add-ons or theme, but not the basic HTML version) isn't too fast. Not as fast as it used to be a year ago on Chrome either, but not as bad as FF.
It's always been a little surprising that this isn't grounds for a huge fine, but apparently they get away with it by saying something vague and corporate like "we can't be sure this works".
If you've updated your installation, the new renderer will be the new version, but the parent (ui) process is still the old version. The protocol the two use to talk to each other is not fixed, and messages will start looking malformed. Malformed messages are handled by immediately terminating the process, because otherwise security guarantees go out the window.
So the upshot was that you'd get various crashes in the "I updated Firefox and then kept using it" situation. I've run into a bunch personally, and there is _lots_ of crash reporting data on this. The crashes are not OS-specific; they just have to do with whether changes happened to the IPC protocol.
A "proper" solution would be for the parent process to not use the on-disk version of the renderer to launch new renderers. There's work ongoing to make that possible, but in the meantime the crash volume due to this problem was high enough that the mitigation you see was put in place.
1. Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? I dunno, I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update. 2. Firefox has a pretty reliable "Restore Previous Session" feature that works well. I have also been known to throw a SIGTERM at Firefox and just let it prompt me when I start it again for the "Something went wrong, should we restore your session?". Seems to always work for me.
Updates are automatic every day.
>I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update
How often does that happen? It doesn't seem reasonable to put off security updates that have already been fixed and are simply waiting to install.
Firefox is the only program I've run into where automatic updates have led to a negative experience. Every single other program handles them just fine.
Restore session doesn't help if you're in a private session.
Also you may be in the middle of actually using your browser for thing that you don't want to interrupt, a game, an online application, anything really..
I haven't rebooted my system in days, and I make updates twice a day...
Snap and Flatpak apps I think can do this as well, because they aren't stepping on the running binaries during the update. And you get the updated version when you relaunch.
Firefox isn't special in this regard. 100% of my applications on Windows and macOS expect to be quit before they can be updated, and is enforced either by the application, the OS, or the updater. I suspect that distro package managers don't really have a way to do an out of band update, all they can do is step all over in-use libraries and that inevitably causes the application to go a little crazy.
Quite inconvenient.
My browser is open when my computer is running. I do updates at random times through-out the day, for example before installing new packages. Having to close my browser leads to dead sessions and text being lost from input fields and whatever other state there might be.
My guess is that this is some per-tab isolation/process stuff that would result in a mismatch between tabs from before the update and tabs after the update.
This package currently ships no functionality, but may be used again in
the future to display a restart notification after upgrading Firefox.On MacOS or Windows (maybe even Linux with the Mozilla updater, never tried it), the updater does the update on the next restart.
They removed the "never check for updates" option and nag nag nag to update.
I unintentionally updated multiple times when the nag menu conveniently appeared while I was pressing the keyboard.
The last accident made me firewall Firefox's update program.
Two clicks and he's watching the same episode at 4K on any platform he well likes, with no spyware running on his machine.
If its not there I'll pirate without hesitation. The only inconvenience is the time it takes to drag my laptop to the HDMI cable on the TV.
A few seconds later, the video fades in and the episode starts playing! I didn't even notice it and kind of started watching the episode, but then realized that I hadn't actually started it myself!
Netflix almost roped me into watching an episode even though I didn't explicitly ask them to, and that seems very manipulative to me.
They must know by now how many people hate this, but they refuse to let users disable it. If you CC their general counsel and point out that it raises access barriers for users with attention or anxiety disorders, they might actually do something.
Or perhaps management already knows and deliberately makes these decisions based on internal metrics and HN folks are essentially a non-existent blip on their radar...
EDIT: I also regularly leave feedback using the ? button (only available in Watch mode) but it seems to go unread. I don't even get an email "we take your feedback seriously and will look into this" which other sites tend to provide.
> Improved performance and reduced crash rates by [doubling web content loading processes from 4 to 8 [1]
From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency. I think there's supposed to be a link to more explanation or the relevant ticket, but it looks like they forgot to actually add the link. Can somebody fill it in here?
While that post addresses the reason why we can double the number of processes, I think I'm still missing the reason why we should double the number of processes (aside from performance reasons).
I mean, the release notes made it sound like more processes is more stable than fewer processes (unless I'm misreading it). How does doubling the number of processes result in fewer crashes? If we manually force FF 66 to use 4 processes only, would it result in more crashes than using 8 processes?
Mozilla/Firefox is writing more stuff in Rust, where concurrency is easier to do right. I'm not sure how much that effort has improved the reliability so far but it's happening:
This is also why we can't have nice things by the way.
Sure, almost everything mentioned in the article is problematic. Then again, maybe it's just us programmed to hit Ctrl-T too much over a decade...
Navigation (forward/back), history, tabs, bookmarks et all are all trying to do various forms of the same thing, and their overall relationship to each other is fundamentally broken, because each individual component is too rigidly defined and isolated.
I should be able to click between a couple buttons to see how tabs are 1) related to each other from a time/clicked/navigation history perspective 2) workspace perspective 3) topic perspective
I just open new tabs whenever I think something might be worth reading, but only have time every now and then to actually read part of the stack.
I would definitely love to see more experimentation around this area.
[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/07/24/chrome-experimentin...
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simpleundoclose/em...
The closed tabs are saved in a searchable list so if something actually important gets closed you can find it again, but I find that 99% of the time I don't even notice that it has auto-closed hundreds of tabs I've opened over the course of the day.
I think I used to tell myself that leaving tabs open was sort of a 'soft bookmark', but now I just bookmark stuff that I genuinely want to come back to, and let the rest of the unimportant stuff I stumble across just disappear.
I have no idea what to do with them. Even something as simple as "read them" is .. and then what, close and forget them?
No idea what I even want to achieve - integrate them into my life in some hoarder kind of "this will make me a better, more knowledgeable person" way?
Let the war begin!!
Unfortunately, during the transition to quantum and WebExtensions the developers blocked add-ons making changes to the Firefox interface, which crippled TMP and a variety of other add-ons. To suddenly have your favorite add-on crippled is a little painful but what made me walk away was the tone of responses from Mozilla people on the boards and the bug reports. It ranged from dismissive, to arrogant, to angry which, particularly given how quickly the transition took place, just added insult to injury.
It seemed like Mozilla did get the message by the end of 2017 that their approach and response to add-ons had alienated many users. One of their 2018 visions included a statement that 'In 2018, extensions will be one of the reasons why people choose and use Firefox.' Unfortunately, when I looked at the TMP message boards last year I still saw very little in the way of signs of cooperation and encouragement from Mozilla. The TMP developer, onemen, still seems to be trying his best to produce a suite of extensions to reproduce the lost functionality and to be fair to Mozilla they have been moving obstacles out of the way but the pace is glacial.
Chrome may be creepy and invasive but right now it's far more flexible and remains a smoother experience. I'd really love to switch away from Chrome but I won't trade it for an inflexible Firefox UI. If Mozilla could loosen up on the UI restrictions, demonstrate that they're doing everything possible to make the product friendly for add-on developers, and somehow get themselves around to replicating, or helping to replicate, TMP and other crippled add-ons then I would enthusiastically consider switching.
The real failure was that WebExtensions should have been started several years earlier, but for various reasons that can was kicked down the road. That is an interesting untold story.
Toolbar:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215064
Session managers:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474130
It shouldn't take three plus years to fix an upgrade. The goal was good, WebExtensions are a significant step forward as a concept. Planning, execution and post-transition management sucked.
The second issue, what you are probably referring to is how the page is animated between those two points. Firefox now uses something old Opera used to have, a really gradual scroll. All chromium-based browser I just tried have this rather jumpy scroll. It's different, but it is not nearly as bad as it used to be in FF.
In short, I don't know, but "smooth scrolling" is something you might want to search for.
The other browsers are probably mostly tested with Apple's high precision mouse/trackpad devices that report scroll distance in very small steps instead of the coarse distance reporting of standard mice.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smoothscroll/nbokb...
Chrome and Safari support keyboard multimedia keys to play/pause video and audio which firefox does not. Picture in Picture is not available on Firefox.
Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.
https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html mentions about excessive power consumption on webrender.
Until recently Firefox's URL bar had a THICK blue glow when it was in focus, instead of the more subtle one the rest of Mac OS has. It infuriated me. They didn't fix it for years. Why? Because nobody noticed it or cared enough, I guess.
This was actually one of my major annoyances, since I use this feature often. I'm glad they added it, chances are others use it too.
Apologies for the mistake.
I really don't understand the priorities of the Mozilla/Firefox project.
Yes, there are bugs filed on the other keyboard issues -- some more than 10 year old, e.g., 433966 or 429043. I could probably fix them myself, with enough effort, but Mozilla has the weirdest architecture so all my Mac programming knowledge won't help much. The last time I filed a minor bug against Firefox (context menus appear in the wrong place by a couple pixels), it was tagged "[good first bug]" -- and it ended up taking some poor soul 7 months and 790 lines to fix, and I still don't think it's correct.
I think it's time for someone to out-Firefox Firefox. The free and open nature is great, but the UI is collapsing under its own weight.
Works on Chrome as I found out today.
I believe this isn’t enabled for KDE Plasma.
If you like a separate title bar like the old version of Firefox, then use the hamburger menu, choose “customise” and check the box for the title bar.
Someone knows if it's customizable in the config menu, searching the obvious "titlebar" reports only two not useful entries?
Could be that Ubuntu were already doing this and it has now made it upstream, I suppose.
UPDATE: Yes it does, but it's not enabled by default. (?)
I went over the subject here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332
"I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me"
Funny, I'd place the golden age before all these things you cite.
Out of curiosity what's your favourite website, what most sums up your golden age?
But web is also a tool (and a necessary one for many jobs). And advertisers have abused web to such degree, that there had to be a push back.
As far as white listing vs black listing goes, white listing is always better option. Especially for things like this, because i know that i don't want ads/videos/sound from 99% of websites I visit.
Firefox has the functionality, now it needs to cement its narrative.
It's infuriating that a page can dictate what gets placed in my clipboard against my will.
I had to tweak my Firefox quite a lot to pass that "benchmark".
The ongoing Fission work is basically defense in depth against future potential Spectre-like vulnerabilities.
No and Yes.
No, theoretically there could be spectre vulns. Practically we have seen zero spectre-based attacks in the wild. It's not a big deal.
- Firefox -
I wonder whether there's a way around that, but I don't see it.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...
Options -> Privacy & Security -> Block Websites from automatically playing sound -> Exceptions (Allow/Block)
How well does this work in practice?
very good, thanks for the hard work!
I hoped it was fixed in the release but seems to be not the case.
I don't care about the video, because any hostile website could still generate video by using gifs, or by playing a sequence of image frames using JavaScript.
If the objective is to stop autoplaying sound, why solve a more general problem rather than solve the actual problem?
Been using Firefox nightly on Android and it's on par with chrome (even faster with ublock running since FF can run extensions on mobile), but the battery drain feels higher than with chrome.
"Fixed: <button> element is no longer special cased in event dispatch, per latest specifications"
I'm opening a lot of windows because I'm not a fan of tabs. So Firefox feels extremely sluggish to me even though the actual rendering and JavaScript execution is anything but sluggish.
I'm not even sure if Firefox windows open so slowly for a reason or if it's just a really badly designed animation.
They added this to my home page, despite the fact that my default search provider is DDG.
Mozilla, could you STOP bundling advertisements into my browser?
I would like one prominent check box in the settings that says, "Never, ever auto-play videos. Ever."
I cannot imagine thinking, "You know what this site needs? A video that starts playing by itself!"
Actually it's also time to ban JavaScript after horrendous front end frameworks made simple page loads slow, energy and time consuming.
Javascript is useful, it is just a shame most people dont use it for good.
I built my last webapp entirely without JavaScript. Users constantly praise how fast it is. There's no bugs with the back button. It's accessible out-of-the-box. Form inputs work correctly out-of-the-box. It's clear when data is being loaded/submitted and when it's not (since that's already built into the browser). And on and on and on...
JavaScript is the worst thing to happen to UX, privacy, speed, caching, and accessibility. So much of the web's UX is broken because of JS. It's depressing because it was all unnecessary. We went from a standard declarative interface shared by all websites to an "anything goes" black box runtime.
Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is left but plain text and ads, to thunderous applause. Gross overreaction after gross overreaction and now we're in a state where extensions are a shallow husk of their former glory, you need to jump through legally vague ridiculous hoops to do anything involving user data, a vast trove of great Flash content is no longer accessible to the average user, web apps with sound and video aren't allowed to work seamlessly without an obnoxious "click here to let the webpage do what it should be able to do anyway" button, and various other unnecessary restrictions. How soon until it's the default that you need to give a website permission to display images and you need a license to make a webpage? That's the direction it feels like we're heading in. I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me, but at least I was alive for it.
I went over the subject here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332
It is a much more persuasive argument that the new controls are simply a reaction to bad actors who corrupted the value the original web provided. Sure, when the internet was a smaller village, nobody needed to lock their door: but then the village turned into the city, and locks became necessary. It seems strange to blame the locks for the reason they are needed.
I know you're being facetious, but I liked the internet so much better when I used to browse with images off by default. It could be that I was an optimistic 14 year old, or even simple nostalgia, but the internet felt like a cool friendly place back then.
Chrome is moving more and more towards controling their browser experience, and monetizing their existing web properties (example, there are now ads in the Gmail iOS App)
Apple is focusing more and more on privacy, especially for Safari.This is the best way that can fight back against Google's market share. They've definitely done their market research, so Firefox doing the same is probably in step with market needs.
I think longer term this is going to pay off big for Firefox