Firefox 71: A year-end arrival | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 71: A year-end arrival

hacks.mozilla.org

104 pointsantibland29 comments

See previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694285

Firefox is on a serious roll this year, from performance improvements to actual privacy hardening that matters. Since Chrome rolled out auto-login, I've made it my personal mission to stop using it, and now I'm realizing I haven't even installed Chrome on my newly imaged laptop. I doubt I'll have any reason to switch back.

Installed Firefox in my new machine and never looked back. Before I used Chrome, Yandex, Vivaldi and Opera. Only miss Yandex much superior native start page;

Wow I agree, this is one hell of an update! I'm in awe of the improvements for the developer tools.

There are a couple of websites that Firefox doesn't work. Same experience on mobile.

But Chrome works all the time.

For those cases having Brave or another Chromium browser as a backup works well.

This is absolutely true, though I have still switched to Firefox and no longer use Chrome. I've taken to filing bug reports or reaching out on the "contact us" page of websites when I find a feature isn't working correctly on firefox.

Sometimes those are FF bugs (or "bugs", but FF wants to fix them anyway), and you can report them to the firefox-run https://webcompat.com through the menu.

> People expect websites to work regardless of the device or browser they are using. When a site works in one browser but not another, that is most likely a web compatibility bug that we want to know about.

I reported an inline-svg rendering bug in FF preview. It only took a minute or two, and a volunteer responding within a day that they had replicated the problem and moved it to a Github issue, which frankly amazed me.

Yep. After trying all sorts of browsers for months at a time, I've come back home to Firefox. Despite Mozilla's occasional off-track behavior (Mr. Robot add-on, Pocket, etc) I still think they are hands-down the best option.

That's truly saying something that if Firefox can screw up every now and then but still feel worlds ahead of other browsers in terms of their approach to web browser building, and that's how it feels to me.

Chrome auto-login was the thing that made me leave Chrome for good. That was the turning point, and it's been a long time since. Manifest v3 is just another nail in the coffin for me personally.

> Sometimes you need to find a CSS file that defines a color, or work out which file generates a button label on a page. Full-text search makes this possible by letting you search through all resources in the Network Monitor.

This is incredible.

Yeah, love this feature, will be a definite time saver. I like all of the updates.

I wonder if they couldn't use Firefox Replay's features to enhance privacy: "taint" code that has touched identifying or fingerprinting information. If that code tries to exfiltrate such information, replay that data path with dummy values.

It would also be interesting to extend this to the OS level (maybe for user data first, and maybe move on to fingerprinting information later).

> The Network panel has a new Messages tab. You can observe all messages sent and received through a WebSocket connection.

This is awesome. Definitely a feature that separated FF from Chrome DevTools

>We would however like to highlight Picture-in-picture (PIP). If you start playing a video on a web page, but then want to check out other content, you can activate PIP and keep the video playing in a small overlay while you continue to navigate the rest of the page (or other pages).

That's pretty nice.

Only reason I haven't moved to Firefox on my Mac is that I can't reassign keyboard shortcut for tab change (without using any external software).

Firefox default is Cmd-Shift-[], which gives me pain in left hand if I use it too much. So I have used OS keyboard to reassign the tab change to Cmd-[]. Most apps seem to respect it, but Firefox doesn't.

Does anyone have a better solution?

Ctrl+tab and Ctrl+shift+tab also cycles through tabs on macos. Note: ctrl, not cmd

One problem with this is that it’s a combination keystroke involving two special keys and tab. That is bad for your fingers especially if it something like tab switch that you use a lot.

With Cmd-[] you just use total two keys which are easy with two hands.

I just noticed that CMD+Alt+left/right also work. You might be able to push CMD+ALT with one thumb and left/right with your right hand

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

allows you to set a keyboard shortcut for it (among other things)

disclaimer: I don't personally use it.

I don’t install any addons on my browser. Wish Firefox worked just like others.

I agree it's very annoying you can't change keyboard shortcuts in Firefox.

If you use the Mac trackpad, use BetterTouchTool to assign a gesture (I use tiptap left and tiptap right) to the switch tabs left and switch tabs right keyboard shortcuts. You can assign them per-app so it can send a different combo for Firefox than anything else.

As mentioned in the original post, I don’t want to install additional software. If I was open to that Karabiner would be perfect. Thanks!

I agree that Firefox has been doing great.

The one thing that's really lagging is adding back support for more of the customizations that were lost in the transition to the new architecture at FF57.

For example, one of the most useful and popular add-ons ever was called Tab Mix Plus. Here's a link to the open issues blocking the re-implementation of this functionality.

http://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=73159#p73159

I switched from Chrome back to Firefox some time ago and generally I'm happy with it.

Just this Firefox Lockwise stuff seems to be buggy. Every once in a while it disables automatic password fill-in. The security menu is also badly labled, it states something about asking if login data should be stored, but it's also resposible to fill it in after it was stored.

There is a weird and pretty nasty bug in FF71. When using a built-from-source version (such as are available in distros), it breaks at least LastPass.

See: https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=356405

My favorite feature is enabled subpixel positioning of text on Linux. Gives text a more evenly spaced look.

Dont forget that if you manually update, Firefox destroys your update settings:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400

The Mozilla person who marked this wontfix summed it up pretty well, in my opinion:

> hi, the distribution folder is a way for third-parties to bundle/modify the browser - when a user is paving over a firefox installation with a setup file provided by mozilla, the assumption/signal is, that they want to receive the plain unmodified version of firefox. that's why the distribution folder is getting removed by default. this is the documented behaviour and if you want to keep the distribution in place when using an installer from mozilla, you'd have to run it with the /RemoveDistributionDir=false parameter: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/installer/wi...

> so i assume this bug is a wontfix...

When will Firefox support dithering in gradients?

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