Firefox 80 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 80

mozilla.org

409 pointsamake291 comments

I had switched away from FF to use Chrome predominately a few years ago, for a mix of various reasons. Performance being a big one. But I've been thinking more about the whole browser monoculture issue, and the importance of Mozilla and Firefox for the Open Web in general lately, so about a week or two ago I started switching back to Firefox as my primary browser. So far, so good. Performance feels pretty snappy so far, and I haven't run across many rendering issues, and none that really matter.

All in all, I'd say that if you have been considering Firefox, now might be a good time to give it a shot.

This is all, BTW, in reference to the desktop version (Linux specifically) not mobile.

Even Firefox for iOS (which must use Safari WebView) comes bundles with a decent content blocker. Recommended.

My favorite Firefox extension is tree style tabs. It displays your tabs as a vertical menu on the side rather than on a horizontal line at the top. I've been using this extension for years and I'm going to use it for the rest of my life. I highly recommend checking it out.

I agree, tree tabs is the best. How do people manage with out it?

By having 8 tabs.

I really liked Tree Style Tabs before the restrictions on extensions.

I do understand that they needed to discontinue them, because it was a roadblock for faster engine, but they felt less like a hack to provide that functionality.

It still works great, has any functionality been removed?

I think mostly that it is not part of the UI. Functionality wise I think it is ok.

Basically:

- the original tabs are still displayed (I know there was some way to tinker with FF files to have them hidden, but now I can't find where I've seen it) - when viewing bookmarks, the treestyle tab disappears (since it's using the same side bar), so then need to use F1 to get it back) - the old version also had an option where the side bar shrunk, and expanded when you hovered mouse, saving some space.

I installed Tree Style Tabs by reading recommendations about it. It's true, this extension is great!

You mean you're going to use it for as long as Mozilla allows it.

How does it compare to Mobile Safari ad blocker plug-ins like 1Blocker?

I use FF and Chrome, but the sites I visit are distinctly split between these two browsers (i.e. I strictly browse some sites on one of these two browser).

First, I want FF to be around for a long time to make sure there's no browser monopoly by Chrome. That's the primary reason I use FF.

I also trust FF more regarding privacy. So I use FF to log in on sites like my banks, credit cards, and government sites (like IRS and social security). I even use FF to check my Gmail. I use Chrome to browse less trustworthy sites across the internet, and sites that I really don't mind Google tracking my visit such as HN, Reddit, etc. The only Google product that I use on Chrome is YouTube. :)

Thank you, FF engineering team for keeping alternative alive on the web.

Maybe FF team can answer why they keep pushing crap like Pocket down our throats.

I'm a long-time Firefox user. I often hear people with savage opinions about Pocket. Can you state what hardship this has caused you? Did it violate your privacy? Does it impose extra layers of clicking to get work done or occupy valuable screen space? Is it helping to fund child slave labor?

The only time I am aware of Pocket is when someone online reports how this molehill is a mountain to them. I also wonder where they place their mouths while browsing that they experience it as being shoved down their throats.

Imagine how much time you spend on your chosen browser to configure it how you like it. How much extra work is it to set extensions.pocket.enabled to false in about:config if Pocket is causing so much pain?

> Can you state what hardship this has caused you?

It subjected me to a bunch of banal content on my homepage that I didn't want or like.

> Does it impose extra layers of clicking to get work done or occupy valuable screen space?

It occupied a second or two of my attention when opening a new tab. Sometimes I got suckered into clicking on an article, which I almost immediately regretted every time.

> this molehill is a mountain to them.

I clicked to disable it and moved on with my life. I find it unfortunate but not worth more than the two seconds of distraction it already took from me.

> It subjected me to a bunch of banal content on my homepage that I didn't want or like.

Three dot menu -> Remove Section. Ta-da.

Yeah, I said already in the post that I did this, thanks anyhow

I'm not so sure why you're so upset about something that can be removed with two clicks. If that's your only real complaint with a browser, I'd say that's a pretty successful browser.

You are using a browser for free that is decades worth of devtime and effort, gifted to you by its developers and you cry about a config change that takes 2 seconds?

That's why I use high-quality firefox forks like Waterfox, which keeps the most popular Firefox features and security while removing things like phoning home or Pocket.

Its existence signifies that something fundamentally is wrong with Firefox and where Mozilla spends its resources.

If it is so unpopular, how come Firefox hasn’t axed it? How come only popular things like advanced extension support gets axed? These are the questions I ask when I use Firefox. Why are they spending time and resources on horrific products like Pocket when they could be literally improving their browser. Why is it pushed so aggressively and shamelessly?

Pocket is the perfect representation of all the grievances against Firefox rolled into an annoying in-your-face product and so of course it’s going to be the punching bag.

> Its existence signifies that something fundamentally is wrong with Firefox and where Mozilla spends its resources.

Why? I don't understand this. Mozilla needs to make money somehow. Unfortunately we don't live in a post scarcity world where programmers just contribute to OSS because they enjoy it and want to make the world better. Currently they do it because of those things AND because they need an income. Unfortunately things still cost money. (I think this answers your last few questions as well too)

> If it is so unpopular, how come Firefox hasn’t axed it?

I think this is sampling and internal bias. Have you seen the numbers of clicks? I haven't. But I rather like pocket.

They are allowed to make good products too you know. If Pocket is the best they got then they deserve go to zero.

If they have a product so polarising then maybe it shouldn’t be bundled as bloat to the browser.

verroq -- can you tell me which browser you use that doesn't suffer from any feature you don't like? Or is it a philosophical problem where a non-profit adding a small feature to raise revenue means it should be abandoned and died, but if a for profit company building a browser can incorporate all manner of devious and privacy harming features but that is acceptable because you expect so little from for-profit companies?

Being a non-profit doesn’t give them a pass on making bad products. Being open source doesn’t give a free pass on bad products. If they choose a unsustainable business model, where making profit ruins their product, then they created this problem themselves.

I run Chromium, it probably spies on me, but it doesn’t do it in my face, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.

When I run Firefox, they say they care, but they shamelessly bundle that crapware. Makes me wonder if another day after another Firefox update they’ll add Pocket 2.0 without me knowing.

It’s the same issue I have with Brave as well, I cannot stand the BAT integration.

Your arguments are so full of holes I don't even know where to start. Pocket is fully documented and very easy to turn off. That's all I'm going to reply to you on this. Good grief.

I guess the difference is you value things vastly differently. This feature, which doesn't spy on you and takes epsilon resources if not used and can be disabled with two clicks "ruins their product", makes firefox a "bad product", and this feature is "shameless crapware." But chrome spying on you apologetically is acceptable.

While Mozilla has to beg for scraps we're all being sold up the river.

How? Personally I'd rather be shown an ad (sponsored stories) than have my data taken.

I like Pocket. I think it's great and I enjoy the interesting articles it recommends to me. I never would have gone looking for something like it, so I'm glad Mozilla added it.

I have yet to find any site/service on the internet with more varied (in a good way) recommendations. Some of it is junk, but I find myself laughing at least once a week at some of the articles pocket recommends.

Today's highlights: 1. What did Jesus wear? 2. What happens to your body when you walk 10,000 steps every single day 3. A 16-million-year-old tree tells a deep story of the passage of time

My first reactions: I mean, what did Jesus wear? 16 million years seems way too long...

I would never have looked up any of these things, and the odds of me stumbling upon them on Reddit, Facebook, etc. feels extremely low. The sort of stuff Pocket recommends just feels so different to the things other sites recommend to me. I've been a long-time fan of Pocket (even before it was added to FF), so there is some bias, but every time I open a new tab in FF and navigate to some site, there's that split-second of loading where I glimpse these titles, and very often I find myself clicking the back button to do a double-take. Pocket is good. I like it. To each his own.

> If it is so unpopular, how come Firefox hasn’t axed it? Because I don't think it's quite unpopular. I'm a Pocket subscriber and use it very heavily, even before it joined Mozilla and got integrated into FF).

It provides some revenue stream into Mozilla and it's a genuinely useful service.

> How come only popular things like advanced extension support gets axed?

There was a very detailed blog post about it recently. It boils down the architecture being a roadblock and being very open to operational abuse in terms of security and privacy of the users.

Sometimes, the most elegant and useful code gets the axe because, it genuinely blocks something further down the road. It's painful but, it sometimes needs to happen like this. Firefox is a very old code base. It's every part has been changed over time but, these changes were always gradual and connected to previous iterations so, the evolution kinda had a forced path out from some states.

> Why are they spending time and resources on horrific products like Pocket when they could be literally improving their browser. Why is it pushed so aggressively and shamelessly?

You might be thinking some service/product to be horrific but, I personally like to be able to read some stuff distraction free and being able store its permanent copies with my annotations on it very convenient from a knowledge base perspective. Looks like I'm not the only one so, the service's still alive.

I just think it is very seedy to bundle it with the browser and it rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Google bundles a complete platform and a lot of proprietary features for Google products with Chrome, most people don't bat an eye.

Opera bundles some features more than a browser (VPN, et al.) with the browser, similarly people don't get rubbed by it.

Mozilla puts a button which is just a scriptlet to the UI and people got tipped off.

It just sits there and can be turned off [1]. I've never experienced any aggressive marketing for Pocket by Firefox (in app or out of band). I only get a weekly articles digest which, I subscribed and, that's all.

I wish we were living in an era where free and high quality software just survive without any revenue stream and web is not a mess of standards, bombardment of adverts and analytics frameworks and other sinister stuff but, that ship has unfortunately sailed and, I personally still angry about it.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-po...

> It provides some revenue stream into Mozilla and it's a genuinely useful service.

FF itself provides a massive revenue stream.

AFAIK that revenue stream is search provider agreements and it's no revenue stream. In current conjecture, it's Google giving them some money to keep Mozilla afloat so, they don't become a monopoly per se.

Please correct me, if I'm wrong.

How can you have a revenue stream from a search engine if you don't have a browser to view said stream? Therefore firefox is critical to that agreement. Google absolutely gives them cashola for being the default search engine. Most people never change that so it is about a 90% sure thing for google to make money from firefox users. The other things is they can point and say "see we have competition and we're friendly with them even!"

Pocket was extremely popular. The problem was that Pocket was a 3rd party extension that Mozilla, in a hurry to match the Instapaper like capabilities Chrome and Safari added, integrated into Firefox.

The deep integration of a 3rd party extension quite rightly did not sit well with many people.

However, since then, Mozilla has bought Pocket and there really is no reason to complain about Pocket integration anymore than complaining about Read It Later integration In Safari, or bookmarks.

There may be complaints about it from the perspective that I believe that Pocket is still closed source, which would be valid, but not Fromm browser users perspective.

Bookmark sync is end to end encrypted. Pocket isn't. It replaced a feature that was. Mozilla misrepresents it as more private than it is.[1]

Why isn't closed source a valid complaint from a user's perspective?

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/

Lacking end-to-end encryption is a valid complain, but note that encrypted bookmarks still exist in Firefox, and Firefox's capabilities are still better than Chrome's. For example Firefox's bookmarks can be tagged, and you can easily search them from the AwesomeBar.

Pocket does not replace bookmarks, and if you try using Pocket for bookmarking, you're going to have a terrible experience.

As a disclaimer, I am a Pocket user.

Pocket replaced Reading List. I only mentioned bookmarks because they said there was no reason to complain about Pocket any more than bookmarks.

Why would using Pocket for bookmarks be a terrible experience, out of curiosity? Pocket doesn't have folders but Firefox makes tagging bookmarks easier than using folders anyway.

Pocket misses important functionality, like the ability to edit the title of the links.

This is particularly annoying for PDFs, because it can't extract titles from PDFs. If you bookmark something like [1], Pocket's title will be "ifl2014_submission_13.pdf" instead of "Church Encoding of Data Types Considered Harmful for Implementations".

Also, up until a month or two ago, the interface was anti-web, as searching did not have a URL you could use, so you couldn't set Pocket with a custom search keyword, for doing quick searches.

The biggest reason to use bookmarks is the AwesomeBar. For the example above, if I start typing "Church Encoding", Firefox will also search in my bookmarks. That search bar being multi-functional is awesome, because I don't have to remember to search my bookmarks. If searching in your bookmarks doesn't happen often, then it's just cold storage. Plus it's always nice when it saves you a Google round-trip.

There's also the issue that in Pocket I end up saving trashy articles that I don't necessarily want to archive. Although it's nice to remember a read article and find it again in Pocket.

Anyway, I wish Pocket would evolve into a Pinboard replacement, but unless it provides the capability of editing titles, and possibly descriptions too, then it can't be a replacement.

[1] https://ifl2014.github.io/submissions/ifl2014_submission_13....

All this animosity is so weird to me because I like and use Pocket and I'm glad it's there and helps Mozilla.

I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of the Firefox browser experience (crappy sync-across-devices for one) but I'm a huge fan of Pocket. My favourite use is via a Kobo e-reader that can sync the articles for offline viewing. It's just a fairly painless experience on different devices to 'save to pocket' and be able to read a clean version elsewhere later.

What issues are you experiencing re: "crappy sync-across-devices"? Having a Firefox account makes all this seamless.

> If it is so unpopular, how come Firefox hasn’t axed it?

"I don't like it and some people I know don't like it" is not evidence for something being unpopular in general.

> How come only popular things like advanced extension support gets axed?

https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

Also if you don't like it, it's extremely easy to turn off.

Pocket's backend remains closed-source in spite of Mozilla claiming they'd open it, which spits in the face of the moral position they're supposed to hold. It's also set up so that by default it displays ads on the new tab page. While obviously I can disable this, the fact that I have to fight Firefox at all to make it not show me ads and not push me towards a proprietary service rather sacrifices their whole "fights for the user" position. Also on a pragmatic note, I go through enough profiles that disabling it is actually a reoccurring irritation.

> I often hear people with savage opinions about Pocket. Can you state what hardship this has caused you? Did it violate your privacy? Does it impose extra layers of clicking to get work done or occupy valuable screen space? Is it helping to fund child slave labor?

It does in fact impose extra clicks and occupy screen space. People are in fact allowed to care about ethical issues short of child slave labor.

> when someone online reports how this molehill is a mountain to them

I'm so sorry; I didn't realize that your priorities were the universal standard.

> I also wonder where they place their mouths while browsing that they experience it as being shoved down their throats.

And I wonder whether you're incapable of understanding a metaphor or simply revel in dismissing legitimate concerns.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120982 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120804

I actually find Pocket to be very useful as a cross-platform bookmarking app

> This is all, BTW, in reference to the desktop version (Linux specifically) not mobile.

Mobile is better, because you can install uBlock. As far as I'm aware Chrome mobile still doesn't allow addons.

As for FF on the main browser, they really shot themselves in the foot years ago and left a bad taste in any users' mouths. I see this same message in every HN FF update thread (since quantum). They really did fix most of the bugs and speed, but it is hard to build the brand back. The only performance/bug I sometimes get is if I'm doing a heavy research day and open a metric ton of tabs (>100) and things get pushed into swap and don't release, even after closing FF. But Chrome was always a memory hog as well so it isn't enough to cause me to switch over and this is a niche thing (and easy to resolve).

errrr... not sure I understand correctly what you mean with "bugs and speed", specifically "since quantum".

I remember that the day that Quantum released, I suddenly got DMs from my non-tech friends who announced that they had installed/updated FF, and were happy how incredibly fast it was. I remember that because those were people who would usually roll their eyes if I mentioned anything software related in a conversation.

> [since quantum] They really did fix most of the bugs and speed...

I mean that pre-quantum it was slow and buggy. Post quantum it is fast and not buggy.

Perhaps my experience or usage of the browser was different from most, but I would not characterize my experience with Firefox pre-Quantum as "slow and buggy". I rarely noticed bugs and it always seemed to be as fast as Chrome was. Granted, I did have ad-blockers installed and I never ran benchmarks but I never noticed much of a difference.

Right now I have 376 tabs open in Firefox, on Windows laptop with 8 GB RAM. They were 600, but I did a purge a few months ago. 0

0 performance problems.

Just my 2 cents.

Can I ask you why do you leave all those tabs opened all the time? When I get to 20-25 I go mad and start frantically close almost all of them. I really depend on Awesome Bar to reopen sites though (but I like it)

They are things I want to revisit and I found that putting in a "To Sort" bookmark folder doesn't cause me to revisit. I am forced to eventually revisit and decide if I still need it or not. But I don't go to 300 tabs, I usually purge around 100 or less.

Research, trains of thought, read later

We have very different experiences in that case.

Once I go past ~100 open tabs on Firefox, on a 16GB RAM Linux laptop, my whole system freezes. I experienced these issues as late as in June, so it doesn't appear to have been recently fixed either. Note that I do use uBlock Origin so it doesn't just buckle under from ads, but I also make heavy use of Container Tabs, which may also be a factor.

Luckily, the extension "Auto Tab Discard" solved these issues for me.

You can go to about:performance and see which tab is problematic.

Thanks for the tip! I currently don't have many tabs open, but was surprised to see every one of my work Office365 tabs (mail, calendar, etc.) at 100+ MB each...

> Luckily, the extension "Auto Tab Discard" solved these issues for me.

This looks like a useful extension to me (I'd even love if this was a native FF feature). But I'm noticing it has full access to web pages. Does anyone know how Richard Neomy deals with this data?

Perhaps the contents of the pages in each tab could account for such differences in resource usage? A tab count is a very very rough measure. A JavaScript heavy page can have a massive footprint compared to a simple content page.

I have some issues with the mobile FF with typing (filling form elements on some sites). I still use it for browsing as having the addons gives a superior experience. I'd be happy if I could switch 100%, but I have not been able to figure what is causing this issue. Does anyone else have issues with Firefox entering the words "twice" when they try to type?

I don't have this issue but on mobile I switched to the nightly. Maybe that will help?

I’m similar to you, except I’m also using mobile Firefox, and I think the preview/beta Firefox on Android works great. Looking forward to this becoming the standard for everyone.

The only compatibility issues I run into with Firefox are with my company’s internal web apps. It really does feel like Chrome is the new IE6 in the enterprise world :(

Same with me. I jumped to Chrome as soon as it came out because FF was sluggish and pretty much impossible to use. Ironically Chrome was a memory hog although performance didn’t really suffer. When Quantum came out, I switched back to FF and never looked back. Nowadays FF is my primary browser and I use Safari as a secondary browser. Luckily I’ve never experienced the performance issues that come up every time that there is a thread about FF on HN (although I’m starting to suspect that my habit of keeping just a few tabs open might be the reason).

I know it's a hard time for the engineering team at Mozilla right now, but just wanted to put it out there: You guys are truly awesome! Thanks for everything.

seconded, tru marathonists

"Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer."

Neat. I loathe every time I have to install Adobe Reader for something. Unfortunately, all browsers PDF support for things like form filling and stuff tends to be pretty lacking.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i2xom1/firefox_81_...

I love that.

I don't need anything else besides Evince to read PDF but in order to fill forms I always had to use online tools.

Evince can fill out PDF forms and even re-export as a read-only PDF with those forms filled.

I wish that was true.

I've never been able to fill a form with Evince.

I've done it plenty. YMMV I suppose.

Great news. Windows used to come with Reader for this, but Microsoft killed it and said "Edge is the PDF viewer now."

Rather annoying to have the wrong web browser launching itself to view PDFs when Firefox does perfectly well at displaying them.

Edge pdf viewer is a good piece or software. ducks and takes cover

I mean, I think it's great Windows ships with a PDF viewer, so that you don't have to install a PDF viewer just to read the manual for some other application.

But I've definitely felt the support burden of having three different PDF viewers on a given client PC, along with multiple configurations between them. (You can turn on and off the PDF viewers in each browser, and often embed Adobe Reader into the browser, for instance.)

It struggles on longer documents for me. You'll scroll and things will be blurry for a second or two before popping in. Personally I'm a big fan of Drawboard PDF on Windows.

Edge Classic's PDF Viewer was good, but now Edge's PDF Viewer is just Chromium's and it isn't as good, has half the features (especially for the long-form reading comfortability of the old Edge Classic / Reader), and is a higher security risk (Edge Classic / Reader ran in the UWP sandbox, Chromium PDF is a C++ app running native with much less sandboxing out of the box; Firefox uses PDF.js running in the JS VM/sandbox).

You can also run PDF.js on Chromium browsers with the extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...

It was fine, but it's a symptom of a greater annoyance of MS trying to launch Edge as much as they can when I'm not interested in using it. The Windows search bar still launches Edge for search results, and it's never even on purpose because why would I use that for web searches?

I only get them when the search box goes "You typed 'Snipping Tool' so you probably wanted to search for 'Snipping Tool' on Bing. Let me open that in Edge for you."

I did actually use IE as a frequent browser for a while when I had a Surface, on account of touch scroll/zoom being really bad in Firefox and Chrome at the time. But that was the only thing it had going for it.

EDIT: and as someone else points out, Edge's PDF viewer is now Chrome's PDF viewer and it's not as good

It's a symptom of browsers getting embedded PDF readers, which is a trend that was stared a while ago - long before Edge was a thing. Edge had to keep up with user expectations in this regard, so it also got one. But then, if you're already shipping a browser with the OS, and said browser has a PDF viewer, it's hard to justify also shipping (and supporting!) a separate app with the same functionality.

Safari has displayed PDFs forever and yet Apple still ships Preview. It’s quite good in fact.

Can they just give me an actual PDF viewer for the sole purpose of PDF viewing? Is it really the way forward? Bundling everything into a web browser? It feels like a giant security hole.

I suppose it's easier for a browser vendor to build this into their existing program than to create an entirely new one. Your sentiment is understandable to me, (my) PDF viewing is disconnected enough from web browsing to warrant being split off into a separate program. But PDF is probably an expected feature from a browser for many people.

PDF as a native browser feature started IIRC with Chrome — until then, everyone had to use a plugin. I’ve always thought the reason Chrome built in a PDF reader was that Adobe Reader was really slow to start and brought the browsing experience to a jarring halt.

People would even put in “warning: pdf” text when linking to PDFs because of how Adobe Reader slowed people down.

I thought PDF.js was the first implementation. Firefox added it in 2012.

This is my recollection, too. Firefox was first, with pdf.js

Chrome’s PDF viewer launched in Dec 2010[1] with v8.0.552.

The release notes do note that a benefit of the built-in viewer is that it’s sandboxed. That’s fair enough, I guess — the Chrome team had a bee in their bonnet about plugins going all the way back to the Chrome launch comic[2].

Interestingly the Chrome team were using svn back then — that’s how long it’s been :-)

[1] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2010/12/stable-beta-ch...

[2] https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_28.html

I'd actually consider browser pdf viewers safer than a standalone native app. Firefox uses pdfjs, a pure javascript pdf implementation running inside a battle-tested browser javascript sandbox. No unsafe native pdf code with countless holes.

They have long adopted Chrome's C++ one, given performance complaints.

Did they? I thought they explicitly rejected it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1049218

Incorrect, that was abandoned and pdf.js is very-much what's being used.

No it does not, Firefox still uses PDF.js. This is extremely easy to verify by just right clicking and hitting "Inspect Element" on any PDF opened in Firefox (and also you can then just load PDF.js into Chrome on a page, load a pdf into that, and verify the same behavior.)

I stand corrected then.

From what I understand this wasn't so much about bundling everything into the web browser. It was more about the handling of links to PDF files that are served with `content-disposition:attachment` to get the browser to open the "choose an app to open this file" system dialog. Without Firefox being registered with the system as an app that could open PDF files, users wouldn't be given the option to open it with Firefox (often they'd be prompted to open it using Edge). That was annoying people.

Regarding your security concern, Firefox's PDF viewer is PDF.js. Parsing PDF files in a JS sandbox and rendering it to an HTML <canvas> in a sandboxed process should be more secure than rendering it using an unsandboxed app that parses/renders using system APIs.

That's great news. I get fed up of random PDFs littering my Downloads folder.

> Regarding your security concern, Firefox's PDF viewer is PDF.js. Parsing PDF files in a JS sandbox and rendering it to an HTML <canvas> in a sandboxed process should be more secure than rendering it using an unsandboxed app that parses/renders using system APIs.

Almost definitely. You can go to https://www.exploit-db.com/ and search for PDF and see many application exploits for PDF viewers, and that includes for linux (and not just commercial applications, Poppler is on there as well, though more than just a few years back).

PDFs have shown that they are a fertile ground for exploit, so running them though a sandboxed VM is a very good way to limit that problem to some degree.

> Without Firefox being registered with the system as an app that could open PDF files, users wouldn't be given the option to open it with Firefox (often they'd be prompted to open it using Edge). That was annoying people.

Huh that's cool that it's fixed now. It annoyed me so much that I installed an extension for it: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/open-in-browser/

global warming took a massive hit due to corona. If there ever was a time to support it then that is now and what better tool for it than a JavaScript based PDF viewer. That thing routinely drained my EEE PC empty when it first came out, can we get an environmental seal for software so that we have an official logo to shame JavaScript developers with?

on macos, you can just use the built-in preview app. it's similarly not as advanced as acrobat, but a little better than firefox's pdf.js.

i also like opening pdf's in a separate app, as they're usually not part of the main "stream of thought" of the page from whence it came.

Zathura is fantastic.

This, but at least in my Debian oldstable based distro, it requires Poppler, which the currently highest sibling of your post has pointed out has had vulnerabilities at least in the distant past (Edit: ~7+ years ago). (Edit the second: upstream also supports mupdf https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/plugins/, but that’s had exploits as recently as 2017 on https://www.exploit-db.com/.)

Give Sumatra a chance. At least under Windows. It requires a bit of love in terms of changing default color (e.g. single value in config file, from bright yellow to something toned down), but it super fast, lightweight and open wide range of formats (pdf, epub, mobi, djvu).

I (not OP) believe I have. It’s nice, but Zathura can use the same engine (MuPDF, which is responsible for the speed and format support, although Zathura also supports Poppler, which Sumatra has removed support for), and is beautifully vi-like. And what advantages does Sumatra have over pure MuPDF? DRM?

If I am not mistaken Sumatra is windows-only (zathura is cross platform) and enforces DRM (you can't copy from documents which disallow it). It is objectively an inferior option.

Honestly, I really miss Edge's EPUB support. Like really miss it. There's a lot of things I think browsers should not do. WebUSB? WebMIDI? Burn these things with fire. Do not connect the web browser to hardware.

Web browsers are supposed to actually be document viewers. HTML is a document format. I am 100% on-board with web browsers also reading PDFs and EPUBs.

I know Mozilla is hurting for manpower right now, but I'd drop dead with excitement if EPUB support came to Firefox.

> Web browsers are supposed to actually be document viewers.

That ship sailed long ago. For better or worse, web browsers are application platforms now.

Fortunately Sumatra (on Windows) opens pdf, epub and mobi files: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

I switched to it a while back and haven't looked back since. It's open source too.

Not really sure about WebUSB but WebMIDI is pretty harmless, surely?

The browser probably won't be good enough to replace Ableton (or similar) for a while but it is the primary medium for a lot of digital (interactive) artwork - for projects that use sound it's nice to plug a MIDI device straight into the browser.

It can be used for fingerprinting. And most people who care enough to own dedicated MIDI devices also care enough to own dedicated MIDI software.

As long as VSTs are native-only (which based on the low-latency nature of audio processing would probably never see a cloud implementation,) web-based DAWs will never replace locally-run ones. Most music studios airgap their systems anyway.

You could probably get alright performance running in the browser using webassembly. No idea if anyone's working on anything like that.

I'm curious too. From a quick search, I found WebDSP, "A client-side DSP library utilizing the power of WebAssembly".

https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp

> WebDSP is a collection of highly performant algorithms, which are designed to be building blocks for web applications that aim to operate on media data.

> The methods are written in C++ and compiled to WASM, and exposed as simple vanilla Javascript functions developers can run on the client side.

..On further reading, they have functions for video and image processing, but not audio as far as I can tell.

---

There's Glissando, "A web-based digital audio workstation using the web platform APIs (Web Audio, Web MIDI) and WebAssembly".

https://github.com/glissando-daw/glissando-app

They mention "VST support", but I cannot imagine how that's possible from the web.

How far do you go with that? Should web browsers render .docx?

Yeah, that would be awesome.

I mean, sure? XML-based document formats aren't really foreign to web browsers anyways, and it'd probably be a safer way to view third party documents than Word...

And just like that, we'll reinvent OLE eventually, but with HTML5 and JavaScript.

Unfortunately FF's PDF viewer is easily the worst, performance-wise. Whenever I view a brutally overcomplicated PDF (like a map or something) in Firefox it just trainwrecks, and I have to download it and view it in something else.

Maybe they've improved it since last year or so, but I've gotten into the habit of working around pdf.js.

Nope, feed it a modestly complex PDF and it will chew through all 16GB of RAM on my system and crash.

Would you possibly have a link to a sufficiently complex PDF document? I've not encountered one in a while.

"Sufficiently complicated" can mean different things. E.g. a document that's long enough, or one that has a lot of vector primitives in it (basically PDF as a vector graphics format).

For the former, ISO C++ drafts are a good test case. For example, here's C++20 final draft - 1841 pages:

https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4860.pdf

However, when I tried this in Chrome and Firefox, Firefox not only loaded it just fine, but it is also noticeably faster when scrolling.

For the second, USGS publishes their topographic maps as free PDFs. These have several layers, one of which is the vectorized map, and another is satellite bitmaps.

https://store.usgs.gov/filter-products?sort=relevance&scale=...

The ones with a lot of roads and contour lines (i.e. any city that's on hills) take a while to rasterize. Say, Seattle:

https://store.usgs.gov/product/499688

This one is so slow in Chrome, it's practically unusable - if you zoom in and try to pan around, it can take over a second for it to actually move. This despite the fact that it doesn't even render the satellite layer.

In Firefox, you get the satellite layer (and no way to turn it off, so far as I can tell), and yet it feels more responsive. I think it's because the viewport is always adjusted immediately - actual rendering still takes a while to catch up.

In Adobe Reader the rendering keeps up with scrolling, so long as the satellite layer is not enabled. If it is, it gets jerky when rendering any part for the first time. But it seems to be doing better at caching rendered parts of the document - once it's all rendered, it's smooth panning all around. Chrome and Firefox readers both keep re-rendering parts that go out of view and then back, if you scroll far enough.

Yeah, PDFs frequently don't work at all in FF for me, I'd be suprised if anyone set it as the default.

Works fine for me, I already have it setup as the default App for viewing PDFs. I don't even have Acrobat installed. It's not the best viewer out there and it still works fine 99% of the time for me.

On Windows when using Firefox default behaviour launches Edge as PDF viewer. Now I have two resource hungry browsers open. I only have 8G Ram and if I also have Eclipse open then opening a PDF slows my whole computer down. I now download PDFs and use Sumatra to open them. I can continue working.

HN is an interesting place. I often got the feeling that everyone here was working on the latest maxed out MB Pro but your comment made me realize I'm not the only one working with limited resources.

I use a late 2007 plastic MacBook with 4GB of RAM. Works quite well ;) (thanks Linux Mint)

I use 4GB of RAM as well, with Puppy Linux loaded entirely into it (hard drives only mount the same way as usb drives), in a refurbished desktop.

I was under the impression Firefox used PDF.js -- javascript rendering of PDFs -- as its native PDF viewer. I could be very wrong. But if so, would explain the performance issues.

PDF.js is known to be built into Firefox, I cannot think of why it would be, other than for the purpose of functioning as the core pdf viewer. But I am not that imaginative!

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Ques...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF.js

It started as an experimental extension and was integrated once it was deemed stable. That was a long time ago, anyway (~8 years, probably more).

Worst compared with what?

I mainly use Acrobat Pro, but I find myself opening my PDFs in Firefox more and more. Acrobat is really slooooooow, it takes ages for a cold start, and after it started the whole thing gets locked up for a minute or so. Absolutely infuriating. PDF.js/Firefox instead is just a smooth ride for me...

As slow as PDF.js is, Acrobat is somehow slower.

I've never been especially happy with any browser PDF viewer and always use something else. On Windows I mainly use SumatraPDF, which is super lightweight.

Sumatra is good for viewing, though unfortunately terrible for printing.

Really? Surprised an app for a file format designed primarily for printing would have issues with printing. What problems are you seeing?

AFAIK, Sumatra still internally renders the entire page as a bitmap in order to print it. This results in huge jobs being sent to the printer and extremely slow printing.

It also seems to have some odd behaviour in its rendering process, though I've never been able to identify exactly what it is. For example, a plain black-and-white document I printed the other day looked extremely fuzzy, like the early inkjets that only had CMY ink and could only produce "black" as a muddy combination of the other colours. The same document looked normal when reprinted using different software.

+1 for SumatraPDF. Portable, lightweight, reads EPUB and CBR/Z as well.

I agree. FF is already my favorite PDF viewer by far - it's got more features than chrome and I've never felt a native PDF viewer is better in any way. But I never need complicated form filling like you mention, I just need a PDF viewer.

It can't even copy paste normal text properly (the bug has been there for 8 years now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=810636). Line breaks are ignored and words are just smushed together instead. Ever since I switched to FF it has been my biggest annoyance, on Chrome this stuff just works.

The best alternative on windows is PDF-XChange, fairly obscure but extremely feature-rich.

This is a hard problem. Unflowing text requires determining where the next line is and possibly removing optional hyphenation. PDF only deals with one line spans of text at best. Throw in super and subscripts or inline graphics and it becomes nontrivial.

It's not trivial, but as the bug report points out, Adobe Reader can handle it.

Another vote for PDF-XChange. It's very good at selecting text and annotating a PDF. Plus it has excellent printing features.

I really like evince on un*x. It's pretty fast, simple yet it doesn't seem to lack any obvious feature. I don't know if it's available elsewhere though.

Evince used to be available as a msi package on its official site.

Indeed, it was my PDF reader of choice on Windows for some time.

I do not know if that's still the case.

Is there any other PDF reader on Linux that supports booklet printing? I install adobe reader for that sole purpose.

Heck that could even be integrated into the system print dialog so the application doesn’t even matter.

Sumatra PDF is a great PDF and eBook reader for Windows. Apart from the DRM-locked PDFs it works flawlessly and has a nice, minimal user interface and small memory footprint. Also, no spy- or adware as far as I can tell, at least if you download it from the official website.

Seconded. I see no good reason for the average user to download the official reader over this. It's also open-source.

Signing PDFs might be a good reason to use the official PDF viewer

I use Sumatra and love it EXCEPT for when I need to use a fillable PDF. That's when I open the PDF in Chrome.

Sumatra PDF is one of the first pieces of software I install on a fresh Windows machine.

Works flawlessly for all my PDF needs.

My only complaint is that zoom is way too sensitive on macOS, and that it can't be used to fill out forms, as you mention.

Why Adobe though? On Linux, qpdfview. On Windows, sumatra.

Why are they shipping a PDF viewer in the first place? Seems like a massive security problem tbh.

Okular can do all that, might not be as user friendly but definitely gets the job done. And yes if you run Windows it is available on the windows store.

There are so many cases that pdf.js can't handle that it seems like a bad idea to open the door to that trap to users that might not know better.

More importantly, Firefox for Android has a brand new UI (and more): https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-new-f... (GeckoView, picture in picture, Enhanced Tracking Protection, persistent private mode, dark theme…).

The most awaited version in years.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269156

Linked article says it will be available starting August 27.

I got that about a month ago, hmm. Linked article says north america august 27th, so maybe slowly rolling out?

Not sure if you tried it, but for me it was an absolute shitshow. It "upgrades" your settings, so if you then downgrade the app, everything is lost (as you have to uninstall + manually install the old apk). In my case it also decided to reset overridden settings to "defaults" (search engine, save passwords etc.), plus about:config was gone and the homepage cannot be set to bookmarks anymore. I uninstalled it and went back to the latest 68.x, and am now looking for a new browser on Android, possibly one that doesn't treat me like an idiot.

Oh, and add-ons are no longer really a thing. There are only about 10 "officially supported" add-ons. I had to install Fennec from f-droid instead, which is annoying as it is both slower and has some frustrating bugs (for example, you can't customise your search engines properly, so if you select text and then try to launch a search on searx, the query is discarded).

This! And when are we going to get uMatrix back? The one must-have add-on.

I hadn't heard of Fennec, does that let you install add-ons that use the somewhat newer WebExtensions API? Specifically I'm curious if this one I made would work,

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

Fennec is, as I understand it, an older version of Firefox for Android that is no longer supported by Mozilla. I guess it must be more libre or not use Mozilla branding, as it is available in the F-droid store unlikel the normal version. It's a version of Firefox for Android that does indeed support all add-ons, with the caveat that some interfaces might be difficult to use on mobile.

It breaks my heart to say this, but I agree completely on the 'shitshow'.

I've been using FF as my main driver for over ten years, and on mobile every second I've been able to.

I fail to come up with a thing they didn't ruin with this new "revamp everything".

- The home page is worse

- THEY BROKE THE BACK BUTTON.Like seriously, you could get your tab's history and jump back more than one page. Now the long-press does nothing

- Oh, breaking the back button doesn't end there. Previously you could close your current tab with Back, and FF would either close the tab or go to the FF start screen. Now, all the tabs are left open, and I have to go manually to my tabs list and close them one by one. Why?

- probably something else. Or maybe I'm just too angry at my Ol' reliable workhorse so suddenly cheating on me :(

Edit:

- It's also slower than ever, I've never had any qualms about FF for Androids speed until now.

The tab history should be back in version 80

> THEY BROKE THE BACK BUTTON.

This is Google's fault for breaking enhanced back functionality with gesture navigation. Native Android 10 phones can't enable the two button pill nav either so your only choice is the soon to be obsolete three button nav.

One more thing: you can't get a desktop-style tab bar on top anymore, instead you are forced to use the tab button to open the view with all your tabs on it.

Previously you could go to Android Settings => Developer Options and increase 'Minimum width' / 'Smallest width' which would make the phone think its screen was physically bigger, making it so that the Android UI elements were no longer hilariously large and making Firefox switch to the tablet view with the tab bar, well before the point where the UI got too small to use/read.

I figure it'll be a number of years before Android updates make FF 68.x stop working, and while security updates do happen I doubt any of the websites visited by the types of people on HN are going to be compromised and running exploits for old Android FF versions. Plus you have the Android permissions/sandboxing stuff.

Slower than ever? I don’t use a browser on my phone all that much, but I’ve used Nightly on my phone for ages, and tried out Fenix as soon as it supported uBlock Origin. I found it very substantially faster on JS-heavy pages, e.g. the Reddit mobile site was almost twice as fast, across the board, and faster still in places. (I use Firefox for Android for ideological reasons and because it supports extensions, not because it’s fast, because it hasn’t been in the past. I have no idea how it compares to other browsers now, because I never run any other browsers on Android.)

I'm on the Beta channel and using this for several months already, even since on the preview. Can't say it's perfect but I'm getting used to it pretty fast, like 2 weeks. Have no complaints since, and it feels snappier subjectively.

Firefox UI is getting worse over time. It's trying to do too many confusing things.

Why can't we have constant UI for a long period of time? Like HackerNews (I know, apples and oranges) but the point is - changes should be scrutinized to death before implementing them, especially when it comes to UI.

Stop changing stuff just for the sake of following UI trends.

I use Firefox on Android and got a push notification about those changes coming. I sort of rue the day when it comes because last I heard it removes the feature that I most care about: being able to not load images when not browsing on WiFi. Do you know if that's part of this release or a later one? I only offhand some HN discussion a couple months ago that mentioned Firefox for Android changes which included that.

It's very much not an ideal solution, but uBlock Origin lets you block large media elements (and reenable them temporarily or on a site-by-site basis), which might help.

It's horrible. Completely unusable on the tablet, requiring moving from one side of the screen entirely and switching tabs takes a bunch of taps now and is very awkward. Much faster though in general on the upside.

Which contains an option to collect marketing data, which I had to manually opt out. Mozilla really lost my trust with this one, paired with the recent lay-offs and the re-orientation. I will not recommend Mozilla Firefox anymore, sorry.

I have been using firefox since day one and before but at the moment I disabled automatic upgrade on my phone and do the upgrades manually to keep the latest version.

I wish I had done that, as now there is no easy and safe way back. They have 'downgrade protection', because downgrading corrupts your profile. Have to create a new one if you still want to go ahead.

Same here.

Nothing, and I really mean nothing, pisses off users more than revamping a UI without offering the choice to use the older versions as well. People put a lot of time and effort into learning a UI, breaking that just for kicks is utterly irresponsible. Some of us have work to do, a browser upgrade should never come with a mandatory major UI change.

Looks a bit better, lacks features compared to the previous one.

Now I can't share links to other devices without first opening it in Firefox. In the previous version it worked just fine.

> The most awaited version in years.

Is this the version that only supports 5 extensions? Because in that case it's also the most dreaded version in years.

It's up to 9 now!

The new UI is awful. I've been trying to figure out how to like it in the previews but the bookmarks are just totally broken and I can't figure out how you're supposed to use it. I just want some pages I can go to easily. The saved tab group thing where it randomly loses them is not a substitute.

It's definitely faster but I can't stand to use it for very long.

Hotly anticipating the blogpost submission telling me why all these changes were absolutely necessary and anyone who doesn't like it is wrong.

I really like it: snappy with modern design and the extensions I use. It loads faster then the previous version as well.

While we are on the topic, did any get the new FF on their Android phones last week? What happened? It completely breaks my flow of opening a page, reading, going back to my favorite sites and opening a new page <repeat>.. The only way to find your favorites now is opening a new tap, you'll find that when hitting the small tab counter and then the +. You will gather piles of tabs and they are still there after you close the browser (no more setting to forget them upon close). I like the bar at the bottom but that is the only nice thing. Am I missing something? Play store reviews are also pretty negative...

This version is terrible. The start screen with the most visited sites doesn't show up anymore. It is slower on my phone and I don't even know anymore how to view my downloads from within the browser. It really makes me consider changing to another browser, but I don't want to use Chrome. Would anyone have a good suggestion?

Yeah, I was very surprised, at first I thought: let's just get used to it, but I feel like I won't. Why on earth would hitting the biggest touchable area of the UI (the address bar) lead to a completely black screen with 0 options, that's just a big waste, it could have easily presented my most used websites there. I'm also looking for alternatives, it's a big step back imo.

Right now I have 12 useless tabs open, I never had any tabs open (unless I opened them myself for later reading, and those tabs are now lost between all those useless tabs were I just wanted to switch to another website) but it's the only way to get to your favorites and collections (whatever collections may be, currently they are the same as my favorites??). I also can't find print and downloads anymore.

For me the UX is down the drain. I notice I use my mobile less for browsing.. too unwieldy. Like a different browser was installed in that update. At many places it needs more clicks. Address bar completion works differently. You can avoid the new tab creation by clicking Back button after you open, but I hate to do this all the time. Had a huge list of tabs open before. Now the preview thumbnails do not load/refresh, text is bigger and truncated so tab list only half as useful.

The handling of bookmarks is terrible in the latest Firefox. So bad that I can only assume the developers don't actually use bookmarks and just search for websites by name?

Exactly what I was thinking, I was hoping I was missing something but sadly it seems I'm not.

I just use a fixed APK version of FF Android Beta that I will never, ever update.

I like everything of the new version except that it doesn't close a tab on back button.

I got the update today and I hate it. The new UI just requires more tapping, has less features and rendering isn't even faster! The whole web-experience actually feels more messy because uMatrix is missing.

I don't get it. Firefox mobile was how old? Two years? Is that the new standard of software-development where you ditch your source every few years and rewrite from scratch?

I'm very disappointed.

Do you use favorites much? How do go to your next site of interest?

In the previous version I had all my most visited sites as toplevel-bookmarks (which were displayed in the new-tab-page) and a bookmark-folder with "maybe-read-later"-bookmarks. That was never very good on mobile because there was no way to reorder bookmarks.

Now I have my most visited sites in the new "top sites" section and the rest goes to bookmarks. Works for me but there is also absolutely no benefit to before (bookmarks are even less accessible). And you still can't reorder any bookmarks/top-sites/collections nor export/import them.

But why fix old bugs or implement requested features when you can just start completely new and ignore the users. That's definitely more fun for the programmers.

So indeed there is no other way to open a new site than by opening a new tab first. Don't you find that annoying? Or do you navigate back constantly?

I find it annoying. The whole update brought nothing but annoyances.

> Firefox mobile was how old? Two years?

I think the old Firefox for Android (Fennec) has been around for at least 10 years, not 2.

I've got it on my phone, and can't say too much bad about it. It feels fery fluid.

Well I guess I'm not alone: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/firefox_android_updat...

Yes. Thank you. It's really awful. I was afraid I was the only one whose workflow they completely broke. Apparently I'm not, so there is hope yet.

Also gone: offline reader mode pages.

I'm in the beta channel, I cannot believe they released it on the regular channel in this state.

I'm now trying out other Android browsers after having used Firefox pretty much ever since it's available for Android. Brave has offline pages, but the adblocker is much worse than ubo. And the vendor lockin is real, Firefox Sync is nice to have.

And while I'm on the topic of offline pages, let me add another rant: As far as I know all Android browsers, including Firefox, keep commiting the cardinal sin of computer applications. They lose user data.

I cannot count how often I returned to the browser only to find a previously loaded page reloading. Good luck with that if you're temporarily in a dead spot.

Of course most of the time you aren't, but the browsers still lose your data, namely the scroll position. This makes these programs that are, to a first approximation, document display tools eminently useless for displaying documents longer than 140 characters.

Even when Firefox had an offline reader mode - built to read longer documents and with complete control over js and rendering - the scroll position was never persisted. I resorted to copy pasting a sentence to a notepad and using Find in page to resume reading. Ridiculous.

And that's not even mentioning form content and other more application-y state.

Of course I know it's an Android thing; apps don't get to hold on to stuff. So store everything to disk. I'll reload it when I'm good and ready. My podcast app doesn't restart the episode from scratch if I leave it stopped in the background for 5 minutes. I'm sure there are a thousand edge cases, but there's very little evidence of fixing even the simple path.

Imagine a desktop browser pulling shit like that. Again, not just a Firefox issue, from what I can tell none of the vendors think this is important.

> but the browsers still lose your data, namely the scroll position. [..] > Imagine a desktop browser pulling shit like that. Again, not just a Firefox issue, from what I can tell none of the vendors think this is important.

A bug for storing the current scroll position at all was opened shortly after the release of the 2nd generation Firefox for Android (which is the one that's being replaced now, the 1st generation being the attempt to use a XUL/JS interface on mobile as well, which led to horrible performance problems), and then remained open for 3½ years – at which point it was only fixed because I personally was getting fed up enough about it.

So there might be something to that observation… session restoring originally had a number of other annoying bugs as well, one of which had amassed half a dozen duplicate bug reports, but still didn't get much in the way of official attention [1]. On the flip side it did get me contributing to Firefox for quite some time, which was a nice experience, but on the other hand it does make me a bit apprehensive how long some of those lost features and UX regressions will potentially remain that way…

I'm mildly curious about the reader mode issues, though. While I never used reader mode much and so never extensively tested it, I do remember writing some code to handle reader mode as well – on the other hand I guess it doesn't matter much now any more what with the old codebase being shunted away into the sidings for good…

[1] Maybe it's because commercial developers (which includes the fulltime Mozilla staff, since they are being paid for working on the browser) tend use more expensive phones that are less memory-constrained and hence run into session restoring problems less often? Who knows…

"We'd like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox."

How ironic.

"... and we wish them well in their future endeavors."

goodbye and thanks for all the fish / $500M a yr from google

It's sad because normally there's a link with all the new people. The guy who makes the post got fired. https://blog.mozilla.org/community/

The one feature I wish FF had is a UI based profile switcher - container tabs, which are now relegated to being an extension, simply are not cutting it for me. Does anyone know if there's a chance of that making it into the roadmap within the next couple years?

firefox -ProfileManager ?

You can actually just do firefox -p

about:profiles is not amazing, but does exist...

> container tabs, which are now relegated to being an extension

Now? Haven't they always been?

> simply are not cutting it for me.

Do you mind explaining why? I had some problems with them initially (when they first went into production FF), but some small tweaks since then and they've mostly worked exactly as I would want.

The only complaints I have are Google, which I try to relegate to a container, making it really hard to open stuff in different containers because of how they send links in Gmail through a redirect to protect referrer info and making it hard to have separate Google accounts in different tabs (which i could probably resolve mos the issues by not assigning Google to a container by default so some of the switching is more smooth, but ick), and LastPass, which I only really need for work (as I use FF sync for my passwords).

LastPass doesn't seem to be able to deal with containers and work SSO which auto redirects to a container, so I can't even sign in with LastPass without tweaking container domain assignments, and toggling that stuff every time I want to log in is ridiculous.

Other than those, everything works pretty smoothly, IMO. I have 18 containers, of which 6-7 see consistent heavy use, and the most rest are for occasional things and are used once every few days.

> Do you mind explaining why?

I want full blown segregated browser experiences, a la Chrome's profiles. Firefox's containers are great for what I use them for (sandboxing Twitter and Facebook), but I'd really like an entirely different profile for "work" vs. "personal"--with separate browsing history, favorites, cookies, extensions, etc.

I know Firefox offers that functionality (via about:profiles), but as far as I know, it's not as simple to access in Chrome (clicking an icon and choosing your new profile).

That being said, I still use Firefox day to day, but I sorely miss the ease of access of Chrome's.

I like that Firefox really separates profiles and sort of requires a relaunch, which in some ways is a security blanket of its own. Make a shortcut to "firefox -no-remote -profilemanager" or individual shortcuts to "firefox -new-instance -P {profilename}". Build your own launcher UI in your Desktop or your Start Menu or Dock. Use different icons and really separate "work" from "personal".

(I use a mix of profiles and containers myself and a mix of Firefox mainline and Firefox Dev Edition.)

Would a .bat/.bash file with `firefox -P "profileWork"` be of help?

Maybe it would! But I'd prefer profile swapping become a first class Firefox UI citizen like it is in Chrome. Until then, visiting about:profiles is better than finagling with bash, at least for me.

> they send links in Gmail through a redirect to protect referrer info

The iOS Gmail app does this as well -- is it really to protect the referrer? What's the referrer in the case of a webview? I had thought that it was so they could track what people click on, but they must get that information with even higher fidelity from the native app...

What do you mean by "profile"? I'm at least familiar with the word container....

It's a bit mind-blowing to me how big browser apps have become the last few years. Firefox 80 takes up 210.8MB and Chrome _689.8MB_ on my MacBook.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s, Microsoft baked Internet Explorer into the Windows shell. It was badically powering the desktop. Ypu could even set ypur desktop background to an HTML page on Windows at one time. But basically, the browser has been given an enormous amount of responsibility that has not changed much since those experiments. We now have things like Chromebooks that are little more than an OS with just a browser attached.

> We now have things like Chromebooks that are little more than an OS with just a browser attached.

Which makes sense because a browser is basically a set of abstractions over some normal OS functions that blends remote and local actions (even if only a subset of them).

Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this through HTML and JavaScript. They're going even farther with WASM.

If by "even farther" you mean "circling back around" to being Java.

> Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this through HTML and JavaScript.

Java succeeded, you know. Still happily powers embedded systems, servers, and desktop applications. Still runs the same binaries on NT/Darwin/Linux/Haiku/whatever. Don't dismiss it just because it's not the latest hotness.

I'm not dismissing it... but it's being eaten. The Web is the ultimate platform. Every goal Java and the JVM had (that they didn't mostly drop, like native bytecode CPUs) has either been achieved, surpassed, or quickly will be by browsers, Javascript and WASM.

The only holdouts I see are stuff where Java is part of the standard (e.g. SIM cards using Java Card standard) or embedded systems where they use Java of some sort where it doesn't make sense to use the enormous browser runtimes (although I have to imagine that's a less popular option than C, but I'm not super informed on the embedded market).

I mean, I'm not particularly a fan of where this is heading (it feels like we're heading for the second coming of Java applets/flash and all those associated problem), but it seems pretty obvious, to me at least.

Are they getting bigger with respect to average system hard drive size? If anything, I suspect they are getting smaller.

For some reason, Chrome keeps the previous version around after you update it, so you always have two different versions installed (which doubles the space used). If you go to contents/frameworks/Google Chrome Framework.framework/Versions, you can delete the older one and it will work fine, but the space will still get used up again the next time Chrome updates.

Weird, "Google Chrome.app" is 459.7 MB on my Late 2016 MacBook. I wonder why yours is larger? (By exactly 50%, no less?)

But when you consider the fact that browsers these days are essentially operating systems in their own right, complete with a suite of bundled application functionality (e.g. WebRTC, WebGL, SVG, etc.)... it seems pretty reasonable.

The Google Chrome app on a Mac can also still have previous versions inside it.

Right-click on it and go to Show Package Contents. Then navigate to Contents > Frameworks > Google Chrome Framework.framework > Versions

You'll also see a symbolic link to 'Current'. Right-click > Get Info. on that to see which folder to 'not' delete.

Ah ha, yes the math works out.

I've got 2 versions (230.1 MB and 228.7 MB). The commenter I was responding to therefore must have 3. So the "real" size is ~230 MB, which does seem pretty reasonable, and totally in line with Firefox as well.

(For comparison, Calibre is 207 MB, Gimp is 224 MB, and Kindle is 210 MB, while Word is a whopping 2.11 GB, and Photoshop is a similarly gigantic 2.45 GB.)

Ha, yes you are exactly right, had three in there.

I've been trying a browser called NetSurf lately - it's just 16MB on Windows.

Obviously it can't do everything Firefox & Chrome can - it doesn't even support CSS gradients, and has the worst font antialiasing I've seen in a while - but it's fast and lightweight. Apparently the minimum requirements are a 30Mhz processor and 16 Megabytes of RAM - it was originally designed for PDAs and set-top boxes.

https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

Its lack of modern JavaScript support also makes it good at getting around news website paywalls, if you're so inclined.

You! You're the guy with JavaScript disabled that I have to account for!

Bwahaha! Sorry to complicate your work life :)

Say, while I have your attention, have you considered mirroring your site on Gopher? These text-mode Gopher browsers are superfast, with none of those "PNGs" and "JPGs" that slow everything down. 2020 should be the year of Port 70 on the Desktop.

(Just kidding... mostly. I may have opened a Gopher account at SDF.org during my quarantine....)

They are among the most complex apps that average users have on their computers.

Firefox has been constantly crashing for the past 6 months or so on all of my computers (Linux, Windows, and now a new Mac as well - but mostly linux, probably because I use it most). Usually it's just a bunch of tabs that crash (almost always multiple tabs), but about 2-3 times a week the entire browser crashes. It's getting to the point where I don't want to use ff anymore :/

Have you tried resetting your profile? That is a regularly recommended fix for some crashes.

Many times. Doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

Provide some crash ID URLs? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozillacrashreporter

I click send every time it crashes. It doesn't seem to matter what the URL is. Sometimes it's gmail, sometimes it's HN, could be any site really.

Also, they should have the url of the crashed tab anyway.

Click on the URL given it shows you how to get the ID that's asked about: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozillacrashreporter

TLDR: got to about:crashes and provide IDs of the crashes you've had

Ah interesting. OK I've clicked submit all.

I was suggesting you post the urls here or email me at my username at mozilla . com

Oh, sorry. Here's the ones it sent:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-2b1c76a5-cb9...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-b934704d-7ef...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-471234eb-fff...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-10466c7d-5da...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-813b31fa-bac...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-4725aa8f-a98...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-0059ee53-643...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-d829e230-314...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-1d892e59-82a...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-9914bb3e-8db...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-86868331-64f...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-46a98043-1e2...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-939482ee-815...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-175aa608-446...

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/bp-bf4fb4b0-77a...

I seem to have enough windows / tabs open, that when it starts up on OS X it causes a kernel panic ~ 50% time and brings down the whole machine. If it manages to start everything is OK until I try to restart it. Of course, this is technically a problem with OS X but ... no other app manages to do this.

"$app is causing my unmaintained and broken OS to crash"

Out of curiosity, how many windows/tabs? I routinely launch FF with dozens of windows/hundreds of tabs and I've never had macOS kernel panic in that case.

I had this for a while, and it turned out to be a virtual memory exhaustion problem. I never found out the cause - it just randomly stopped happening one day, and I outright abandoned FF not long after.

Have used firefox forever. Their PDF rendering engine is quick and snappy.

After recent events I feel quite nostalgic or sad about new Firefox releases, I can't justify it

It sure would be nice if the memory leaks would be fixed. On some of the long-running machines I use, I have to use chrome because Firefox would eventually fill up the RAM.

I really like the simplicity of the Firefox pdf viewer but sometimes it absolutely butchers printing. It also still needs fill able form support. Come on Mozilla!

In fairness chrome does as well. I have to use adobe to print fedex thermal labels otherwise they get cut off.

The next release will have it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273174 (To be released on Sept 22)

Firefox is my standard browser but it is completely unusable for printing anything; I always have to switch to Chrome to print.

Try and select "Print" from the menu instead of Ctrl+P. Instead of bringing up the system print dialog, this brings up an interface where you can tweak the print layout. No idea why it isn't the default view when pressing ctrl+p. At least there I feel it's basically the same as Chrome when printing.

On my Linux system Ctrl+p and File->print are the same dialog box.

Mozilla is fixing a lot of Firefox printing issues for Firefox 81 (September 22 release date).

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/Printing_and_fragme...

Me too, I like the print preview in Chrome.

Where do you expect them to get the money to fund an effort like fillable forms?

Is there any kind of road for when to expect installable Web Apps the way it's possible in Chrome and Edge?

On desktop? They are working on it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/eay1x1/firefox_73_...

I don't know enough about mozilla's process to understand why bugzilla says it's already done, though.

Does anyone have the issue within developer tools that when you ctl-c a highlighted piece of text it actually just selects the whole line? I have to right click copy to get the exact piece of info I want. It’s driving me nuts.

there's no easy way to disable javascript on site viewing. brave got ir right with brave shield.

add disable image on the ff shield then it's even more useful.

brave suffers chrome's always forced refresh when stale tab is reopened or when page is scrolled up to induce reload wheel

sometimes users do not want the freshest page. there's a reload button for that. sometimes we just want to save the stale page.

The title should be "Firefox turns 80" ;)

Is video acceleration on Linux here yet? :(

i think on 79 you already got X11 support (was there for a while on wayland, if you truly care about UI performance)

Seems 80 for sure has it for X11. It's less about UI performance and more about battery life and heat; I might consider installing a Linux distro on my laptop now, last time I did the poor thing ramped up like it was rendering a video project or something anytime I pulled up a YouTube video.

FWIW, notwithstanding VAAPI support in Firefox, Linux has made massive improvements in power/heat efficiency in recent kernels.

There's much less of a starting-a-jet-engine effect in regular use if you're able to use a distro based on kernel 5.7 or 5.8.

Why would you use a web browser as a PDF viewer instead of Preview...

Because you already have it installed and running, appreciate the security benefits of running a PDF render in a garbage-collected language in a sandbox, because anything that lets you run less Adobe code is a win, and because clicking a PDF in Firefox and having it open in Edge is generally undesirable.

Preview comes preinstalled, and isn't Adobe code...

Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer.

The name reported by accessibility tools for items in multi-tiered tree controls no longer incorrectly includes information from items at deeper levels, providing users with the correct level of content when using a screen reader.

I kinda expected more from an x.0 release.

Best to rein in those expectations. Browser developers abandoned SemVer some time ago (bumping the major number for trivial releases with no major features or breaking changes) for reasons that never really made a whole lot of sense to me. Treat the version number as a monotonic counter, that's all the information you're going to be able to make use of unless you're working on it.

Oh my god, I didn't know they're still releasing those!

Firefox crashing all the time on couple of my computers... the rest are doing fine. Tried to uninstall all plugins, create new profile, all sorts of tricks... Installed FF Nightly, hoping that this bug has been fixed in new browsers, but keeps crashing. Sending reports to FF pretty much every day, hoping that someone will notice, but so far, no luck. And then news came out that Mozilla is in financial trouble and firing people, so probably nobody will fix this :-/

Link to your bug reports?

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/742507c9-b806-4...

Hi ddon. This is not normal. You may be experiencing a unique combination of factors that results in a bug. Could you load `about:crashes` and send me an ID or several of an your crashes? I would expect there to be a high number of similar crashes.

It's possible that we already have a bug reported against this particular crash and we need someone who can reproduce it to help us find a way to fix it! I'll look to find such bug and contact you with the people who may be able to fix it. My email is my hackernews handle `@` `mozilla.com`.

Thank you!

Very cool, thank you! Will do! And I didn't know about about:crashes page, very interesting!

Developer tools' network tab still unusable.

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/01befe672faa84fe.png

Selecting one resource selects multiple resources at once (sometimes 5 or more), and you can only view one of the resources' detail in the right panel.

That doesn't happen for me on Mac. Maybe it's an OS-specific bug?

Yes https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1640745#c23

It happens all the time for me, because PID of my firefox processes tend to be in millions (because of long uptimes and a me doing a lot of kernel compilation).

Probably caused by systemd upgrade back in march. Great. Systemd is another of those packages that keep breaking fundamentals on my systems every other release.

Looking forward to having a network after a suspend/resume cycle again, and systemd-home not cutting off sshd remote access to my machines via infinite loops in its hugely complicated PAM module whenever v247 will be released. /s

No layoffs mention in the release notes.

Why would browser users care about the layoffs?

I suppose the long term view is - what's the economic health of the organization responsible for ongoing maintenance as well as R&D, features, engineering of the software? And also what's the risk of Firefox being "orphaned" or falling behind technologically to Chrome/Webkit. although the comment below is true; there is a time and place for long term strategic comments, vs. technical release notes...

Those are changenotes of a piece of software, not the company.

i guess they should position themselves as software makers then, not social justice advocates https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/

Usually release notes exhibit the state and changes of the software, not the workings and changes of the maintainers. What were you expecting, something like this?

New:

- Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer.

- Laid off about 70 employees.

Fixed:

- Various security fixes.

- Laid off about 250 employees.

even their layoff post barely mentioned layoffs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com