Firefox 81.0 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 81.0

mozilla.org

604 pointsamake225 comments

I wish Containers would get some love. Ability to set root domain for example would be great, so I could keep all Bandcamp sites in a single container without micromanagement for example.

I also wish there was a simple way to suspend tabs, essentially turning them into the "ghosts" they are when you start the browser. So many times I want to keep a tab around for easy access, but they got some stupid JS framework running sucking CPU for no good reason.

That said, overall I'm quite pleased with Firefox and hope Mozilla keep developing it. We need a proper Chrome alternative.

I agree on the containers. It's such a powerful feature, but it feels weird to need extensions to make containers work the way many feel they should intuitively. For instance I have a Google container, but I can't figure out how to make outbound search links open in a different container.

afaik multi account containers should work, if you set google as "always open in google container". temporary containers (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...) would also work.

I use multi account containers and it doesn't work for me. For instance, if I go to amazon.com directly, I get my Amazon container. But if I do a search in Google and then click an Amazon link I will still be in the Google container.

You can right click to open in a specific container. Take a bit of forethought though.

This is fixed now with the Limit to Designated Sites feature. It's a little buried though: click the multi-account containers button in the title bar > the arrow next to your Google container > Manage This Container > Limit to Designated Sites.

Thank you. This is the what I am after. Unfortunately Limit to Designated Sites does not work when combined with the Containerize add-on.

Google feeds Mozilla. I am astonished this extension is even available in the store.

Your could try this extension. I mostly use it for its auto suspend but you can also manually suspend tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

I use the Auto Tab Discard extension, which turns tabs I haven't looked at recently back into the same ghosts as they are on startup. There's a bunch of configuration for how it chooses which tabs to discard. I'm away from my PC now, but I'm pretty sure it gives a right-click option on the tab to suspend one manually if you want.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Do you use this on desktop? The add on install page is saying that the extension is not intended for desktop, so figured it was worth asking.

Not the parent, but I do. It works fine IME.

He linked the android version, if you click the warning it goes to the normal desktop page.

Sidebery is primarily a horizontal (/tree style) tab lister, but this is also a feature of it (calls it 'unload' I think) on right click, really great if something's being a resource hog, but I might want it again later.

Auto Tab Discard works great for me as well. Would love to see something like this built-in, though.

I've also found cutting the content process limit in half to significantly improve performance. Combined with the above add-on my machine doesn't start swapping or become non-performant even with lots of sites open.

Auto Tab Discard is to Firefox memory problems like uBlock is to online ads.

The actual discard feature is native, the addon just exposes it.

Would be nice if ATD didn't kill FF PiP video tabs though!

I used this but had to stop using it as occasionally Firefox would require a restart for some reason or another and when in that state any paused tabs would lose their state if you clicked on them. Lost to much important state and it had to go.

I use Auto Tab Discard along with an extension I wrote to 'garbage collect' (close) the all the discarded tabs by clicking a button in the toolbar

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

I wish Safari has this feature.

I just want temp containers. With all the cookie bullshit you have to pick and choose on each website, I just want to accept it all and then flush the container once I'm done with the website.

Do you know about the Temporary Containers addon? While it has some quirks, it seems to do exactly what you described, automatically and quite intuitively. I'm a happy user for two years now I think.

Man, I love this plugin. Every time I open a link from HN, CTRL-Click (configured this way) and into a new container it goes. Combine it with Chameleon, and you can really confuse some sites.

How did you do that? Cmd+Click opens links in the same container for me, and I can't find the right setting.

In Temporary Containers settings: Isolation tab, Global, Mouse click. Set "Ctrl/Cmd+Left Mouse" to anything but "Never".

Thank you for this comment! That extension is exactly what I was looking for for a while.

"Cookie AutoDelete"[1] extension might be what you want. It flushes cookies after you close all tabs for a site. There's an allowlist of sites for which to retain cookies.

It's nice when paired with the "I don't care about cookies"[2] extension which auto-accepts cookie requests and makes sure you never see any cookie permission dialogs.

1: https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete

2: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

I don't recommend it as a comprehensive solution because it misses some stuff, such as indexeddb and service workers. For maximum isolation you'd want temporary containers.

Looks like Cookie AutoDelete does support IndexedDB [1] and Service Workers [2] by the way.

[1] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/... [2] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/...

This is news to me. Looks like firefox finally added the requisite APIs. The only issue seems to be that it doesn't play nice with container tabs.

I think Cookie Autodelete does though! There's a setting in the extension preferences to make it aware of containers.

From the linked documentation:

>The API for browsing data cleaning doesn't appear to support Firefox Containers. So if cookies from one container are cleared, then all of that site's data from all containers are deleted regardless of rules.

On Firefox you can select “Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed” under the browser privacy and security settings. You white list a bunch of sites you want to stay logged into using the “Manage Exceptions” button. No need for a plug-in. For all other sites you can use Firefox’s remember password feature.

Then, instead of using “I don’t care about cookies” you can simply tick all the boxes in the “Annoyances” section of uBlock Origin. That way you only need one plugin and not three.

That does assume that one closes Firefox, however. While Cookie Autodelete will remove cookies for a site within a few seconds† once the last tab is closed, and correctly handles tabs in containers.

†in case you're redirecting briefly for SSO or similar.

I found that having cookies actively deleted like that often crashes websites inadvertently and it ended up being a pain to manage. Allowing a website to track you for a day or so is not the same as being tracked for months. I believe that it is not nearly as useful to marketers. Closing and reopening my browser after a heavy web session is not a big price for me to pay. I do it to free up resources on my machine anyway.

Sites I log in to I don't clear. Other sites _shouldn't_ be able to tell the difference between deleting cookies and being a fresh visitor. This brings a new problem, in the form of cookie and GDPR banners. But there's an extension for that, too: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/.

With browser fingerprinting persisting across all these flushes, discarding cookies and trackers won't help. You'll still be identified.

Browser fingerprinting is a problem, but the solution isn't to throw your hands up and spoonfeed them identifiers.

Blocking tracking scripts does thwart fingerprinting. I really hope we can figure out a decent access model for JavaScript someday.

Is that different from opening in an incognito window? Genuine question, I don't know how cookies are handled in private windows and what other weirdness they might invite, but they do seem to serve this purpose very well for me. I often 'Open in Private Window' websites that have been linked from reddit or HN but that I don't trust to play nice with my privacy.

You can only have one private window instance, with all your private window contents mixed in that scope. And this instance cannot be discarded until you close every single private window. It would be better to have multiple temporary instances so you don't have different websites mixing and don't need to close everything to reset your session on one site.

Are you sure about that? I was testing some web app earlier this year and everytime I opened a new icognito window I was able to log in again as an other user. Opening another tab in the same window shared the state of the window.

Maybe it's different in Chrome. In FF they all share an instance.

A couple things:

- If you need to restart the browser, temporary containers are persistent. Several times I've lost a session from an incognito window because Firefox wanted to restart and wouldn't let me load any new pages until I did so.

- Pages visited in containers are still included in your browser history, which can be useful if you want to find something again later

- You can have multiple temporary container sessions running at once; while all incognito windows share a session, cookies, etc.

I block all cookies by default with uMatrix (yes, I know.. still using it for now at least though) and then 'Cookie Auto Delete' add-on cleans up anything I whitelist in uMatrix (e.g. to make a checkout work) that I haven't also whitelisted in itself (e.g. I let HN keep a cookie rather than login every day or tab close).

> yes, I know..

Wait, I think I missed something, is uMatrix bad somehow?

It got archieved, meaning the development of it is on hold

Sorry, that was lazy of me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973

It's great, it just might not survive too many Firefox version bumps now. Hopefully there'll be a clear successor fork to switch to before long.

use the temporary containers addon... the multi-account containers addon is nice too.

You could just block all cookies and make exceptions to enable them for the few websites that you need to log in.

The only downside is the GDPR warnings keep coming back. I've been making custom CSS and JS injection rules to get rid of GDPR warnings though by removing or hiding them from the DOM -- any Adblock-style plugin to get rid of all of those? If I hide all the GDPR popups with custom CSS, I will have never seen them, and therefore never agreed to them, and if I block cookies they can't track me anyway.

uBlocks "Annoyances" list should cover a lot of cookie and GDPR notifications. If that doesn't go far enough there's also a really great ultra annoyances list that'll unstick and remove just about anything that tries to constantly stick itself on your screen.

https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

Oh thanks, this looks amazing!

It does but very often a site won't let you proceed until you clicked the ok button on their annoying popup. And because the pop-up is blocked, there's no way to proceed then :(

I've seen this on several sites now. Understandable but having to turn off ublock puts you on the radar of all the trackers again.

Maybe we need a more advanced plugin that auto-agrees to all those tracking cookies to make the websites think they got permission and work, but then blocks/deletes those cookies so that they don't actually get to track.

Or even better, if the tracking uses some commonly available libraries, actually mess with their tracking data and send it back so that it's a lost cause on their part to even try to track people. Doubly awesome if FireFox can ship a browser that in its default configuration messes up tracking data with false data (hee hee).

It would be amazing if it could to that! But with the current marketshare of Firefox, it would be a drop in the ocean :)

https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ works in many cases.

I wish ctrl+tab would cycle through all recent tabs regardless of what container they’re in.

I see this works. Either it always did, or has been changed since I first noticed it

There's an addon called Containerise that seems to do what you describe. The basic usage in the description could be easily used to isolate the bandcamp sites.

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

Works great in combination with multi-account + temporary containers extensions.

Grants the ability to regex match on domains & url paths for sites that do auth redirects or to isolate corporate & personal accounts on the same domain (github, google etc) - MAC should have this functionality built in, and there are several open issues requesting it.

Containerise does have builtin limited temporary container functionality, but I found the separate extension to have more useful configuration options for how temp containers are handled

> Ability to set root domain for example would be great, so I could keep all Bandcamp sites in a single container without micromanagement for example

I think you can already do that, unless I'm misunderstanding you. If you use the "Always open this site in..." menu option while you're on the bandcamp website, it'll automatically change the container then next time you visit any bandcamp.com url.

So close yet so far.

If I go to https://mayflowermadame.bandcamp.com/ and select "always open this site in...", and I then open https://vandrer.bandcamp.com/ having not visited it before, it doesn't open the site in my Bandcamp container.

MAC Containers developer here. This treatment is done by default in the Facebook Container add-on. It's more of a question of how to handle the setting on a per domain/Container in the UI.

Follow along for the root domain issue here: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/1...

Not for the root domain, no. It treats www.acme.com and mail.acme.com seperately

Suspending tabs would be very useful. I used to suspend tabs in Chrome by freezing the process of the tab (kill -STOP | kill -CONT), but Firefox shares the same process for multiple tabs.

Has anyone tried to implement a "suspend tabs" extension that would pause the debugger ?

yes, if firefox gets ornery (with entirely too many tabs open all the time), i just kill some/all of the "FirefoxCP Web Content" processes (on macos) and then reload only the tabs i'm interested in at the moment. not the ideal level of granularity, but works ok in a pinch to reduce memory/cpu usage.

This is something that bothers me a bit. On my PC memory usage spikes even after having tabs open for a short while.

I've recently shifted to Firefox and I noticed that after opening 10-15 tabs on about 3 separate firefox windows the memory usage is way higher than Chrome's. I have seen lesser memory usage on Chrome for way more tabs and windows.

I have very similar observations on my android phone as well. I've had 100+ chrome tabs open on my phone with no hiccups, but about 20-30 in, on Firefox, my entire phone slows down to a crawl and tabs start crashing etc.

Is it just me?

my impression is that all browsers are pretty greedy about memory for the first few dozen tabs. once you get to hundreds of tabs, the serious optimizations and compressions kick in so that the per-tab memory use curtails drastically. but i'm no expert in this area, just a user.

> So many times I want to keep a tab around for easy access, but they got some stupid JS framework running sucking CPU for no good reason.

Why not keep it as a bookmark? I don't understand why people live inactive tabs open.

I'm a tab hoarder. I open several tabs releted to some task and keep them opened for weeks and months.

Later when I search for it in address bar and Firefox offers me to jump to one of the tabs, I do that and instantly see related tabs to the left and right of the current tab. My current tab may not always be the exact one I was looking for, but the one I need is still easilly trackable.

If I don't do that and try searching the web my search may not be precise enogh to bring the needed page.

Overall, it's just a different mode of browser use. It suits some people and doesn't suit others. Good thing that Firefox can accomodate both types of users.

Take Gmail. I want it easily accessible, but I don't need it running in the background as my phone will ping when I got a new mail.

When developing, I'll open a new window and keep some tabs relevant for what I'm working on. Frequently it involves me piecing together bits from different APIs or parts of APIs, so require switching between multiple tabs. Often I'll have to come back, and it may take a day or two. No need to keep the tabs running, I just want to quickly pick up where I left.

Stuff like that.

Bookmarks discard a lot of (potentially valuable) context that tabs don't. History, for one. Parent & child tabs, if using Tree-Style Tabs, for another.

Honestly?

As a tab hoarder, I have wondered why I do this so many times. I think the answer is that Firefox's bookmarking is ... not great. It is always slow and clunky-feeling to use. You're forced to put these bookmarks into a tree structure, which isn't awful until you realize that you have to remember just how you stored it later. Just for reference, I often find myself running SQL commands against Firefox's places.sqlite DB to locate a page I visited.

I think tab hoarding could be greatly reduced by a series of thoughtful improvements to bookmarking.

Bookmark-Workflow in Firefox (and probably all browsers) sucks. It's far to much hazzle to manage all the crap for the low benefit it gives you. Because Session-Managment in Firefox is now working so well, there is not much benefit for bothering with bookmarks.

If they would improve bookmark-handling it might be a different story. I thing it would probably not even so hard doing this. There are already many addons implementing significant improvements on certain parts. Just combining them and streamlining the whole stuff might be enough.

You've been recommended Auto Tab Discard.

Another one I use, and it works very well, is UnloadTabs [0]. I discovered it because it's one of the addons recommended by Tree Style Tab [1].

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/unload-tabs/

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

Relatedly, it would be great to be able to edit site lists manually. Often sites redirect to a short URL briefly at login, which breaks when using containers. Seems to be most common for me with banks.

my only complain about containers is that it doesn't work well when you want to authorize an app. For example, I want to sign in with Google on my Zoom app but since i told them to always open google domain on my B container, it opens it in B while my gmail account for personal use is in A container. My workaround for now is to change the default browser app and revert it back once i'm logged in. I wish there was a solution for this.

The way Chrome has integrated the switching between 'Google account' is super useful and well done.

I've got a lot of marketing clients I work with, and having everything in the context of a google account for that client is deeply embedded as part of my workflow.

I could do the same with Firefox accounts, they just need to implement it!

The whole idea of having everything in the context of a Google account is the exact reason I use Firefox and not Chrome :)

Yes the containers are amazing but I kinda miss the way to change settings in each container. Sometimes I mistakenly chick allow notifications in a container but can't find any way to undo it without deleting the whole container.

Related, Firefox 80 landed the VA-API Changes for Linux [1]

It has drastically improved viewing 4k Videos on Linux for me where before the video would use up 100% of my integrated GPU, and now its down to 0%

AFAIK Chrome isn't using this as seen from intel_gpu_top so this was a major improvement for me.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...

Firefox on wayland has been a joy to use recently (webrenderer, dmabuf, webgl, vaapi). Everything including video and scrolling is butter smooth and doesn't clog the cpu, even with 200-300+ tabs (i know...) over several windows. Much better than Chrome (on Linux at least). Interestingly, RAM usage also seems to be better in ff (both with plugins), but that might be anecdotal.

Do we still need moz_enable_wayland env variable or is this the default now?

I’ve been a Firefox user on Linux for the past 2 years. I recently had to open Chromium to accommodate a site that refused to work with Firefox, and I was quite shocked at how much snappier Chromium’s UI felt. Going back to Firefox the sluggishness is palpable.

My machine is in the upper-mid range with a TR 1950X + Vega 56, so I can’t imagine it’s a spec issue.

I’ve read the entire Arch Wiki article on Firefox performance [1], ensured that hardware acceleration and other performance settings/flags are enabled, and tested different configurations of theses settings. Nothing made a discernible difference.

Chromium, even with hardware acceleration disabled, is dramatically more responsive than Firefox.

I have been very tempted to go back to Chromium. Ideologically and privacy wise, I really want to support Firefox, but I can’t help craving a lightning fast UI.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks

Have you tried enabling pixel-perfect scrolling?

Scrolling is fine, it’s most other UI interactions like button presses (both browser UI and in-page).

Funny, for me this is something i need to turn off to make it snappier. Especially the mousewheel scrolling really feels laggy with it on.

This is curious to me. Were you using any extensions?

I have tested with a clean profile and didn’t notice a speed up.

This is not to say Firefox is slow, but that Chromium feels much snappier.

It's a sad pain point isn't it...

I too dropped Chrome for ideology and the snap was dearly missed.

I feel the same on Mac. I really want to use Firefox but as of right now I feel like Chromium is much better built. Another annoyance is the back and forward buttons don't work on Firefox but they do work on Chrome. I'd check out Brave, they've done a few shady things in the past but generally care about privacy and are quick to resolve any issues

I own a Dell XPS13 9380 with Intel igpu 620 and switched back to Chromium (without the hardware acceleration patch). My OS is Archlinux, LTS kernel and my desktop environment is Gnome Wayland.

Starting from Firefox 79 I had to disable webrender, otherwise youtube videos crashed very frequently. So except for watching videos, the Chromium experience is much smoother and consumes less cpu. There is this Fishbowl web browser rendering test, for Chromium I can display 100 fish at 60fps, for Firefox (without webrender but hardware acceleration) with 10fish I get only 53fps.

For watching youtube videos (with h264lify on both), I get on firefox between 15%to25% cpu consumption with Vaapi but without webrender. With both vaapi and webrender it is <15% but very unstable. Note that on Windows10 for the same hardware cpu consumption is between 5% and 10%.

For Chromium and youtube videos cpu consumption it is more like between 20% and 40%.

So I hope the webrender is more stable with Firefox 81, but I think I'll keep Chromium for anything other than watching videos.

Quick update since Firefox 81 package has been released in Arch repos, I have been able to test it and it seems that videos instabilities are gone. I get a <10% cpu consumption on youtube videos with webrender + vaapi.

I've also (unfortunately) noticed that Chrome is much more responsive on Linux than Firefox on several different machines.

In fact, on a resource-constrained VDI for internet access (for security reasons), I've also noticed that Chrome seems to prioritise interaction of the UI elements much more than Firefox does: in Firefox I've often noticed that when the page has animated items (whether gifs, videos, etc), Firefox seems to prioritise playing back the content over responding to keyboard or mouse events (i.e. page up or Ctrl+W), and can often take multiple seconds to respond, whereas Chrome responds to events much faster. Maybe it's something with the event loop?

This fits with my observations. It’s not that Chromium is faster than Firefox per se, but it responds quicker to user interaction giving it a snappier feel. I think it has to do with prioritization and other tricks to make it ‘feel’ faster than it is (e.g. pre-fetching).

If I were a developer, the battleground of the web through Firefox would be one that I would seriously consider putting my time, energy, blood, sweat, tears, pride and joy into.

As far as I can tell my Firefox on Linux is as snappy as snappy gets.

Firefox is my main browser on Linux, but sometimes I browse using Chromium. Both feel equally snappy to me -- even though I have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox and several add-ons, and none on Chromium.

There are Chromium-based browsers, like Brave, that might give you the snap while maintaining the moral high ground.

I've been a big fan of Vivaldi for a while now. They seem really on top of adding features and customization options. Everything feels snappy and is a great balance of modern/performant UI.

I use it as my work browser, and run Firefox as my personal, mostly due to Vivaldi not having an iOS browser (I love me some tab sync).

Thank you, I hadn't heard of it. Looks like a better job of extending the UI than Brave, which is pretty conventional. Either one is "Chrome withOUT the all-seeing eye of Google".

https://vivaldi.com/

https://brave.com/

Vivaldi has the the best 'history' page of all the browsers.

Displaying your browser history as a calendar is one of my favourite features of any browser.

I had the opposite experience. Used Chromium for as long as I could remember, then it started becoming too slow and memory-hungry. I switched to Firefox and it's been so much better! It's super fast and uses way less memory. The only thing Firefox is truly a lot slower on my computer is the startup. But the only case in which I start Firefox is after updates, otherwise it's always running.

I'm running Firefox on ArchLinux with the 5.8 kernel and an Intel motherboard with integrated graphics.

Very interesting. What are the rest of your system specs?

I have the same setup on my desktop and laptop computers.

Desktop: quad core Intel i5, 16 GB RAM, SSD,integrated graphics.

Laptop: quad core Intel i7, 32 GB RAM, SSD, integrated graphics.

I found the bug about the colorblind mode being inaccurate and misleading interesting: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1655053

  The [dev tools colorblindness] simulation is inaccurate, using color matrices with no scientific basis. While the source cited in devtools/server/actors/accessibility/constants.js does not list its source, the matrices appear to be the "colorjack.com matrices" [1] (and do not originate from the scientific literature). As far as I'm concerned, this is worse than not having such a simulation at all, since it gives people a false sense of accommodating individuals with color vision deficiencies.

That poor intern is going to get.. a stern talking to.

This kind of disparaging really doesn't contribute anything in open source. It's not perfect, it's a work in progress. We don't disparage something, we bring a pull request with a wrapping text that explains why it's an improvement. And see, that gives the author the credit for contributing whatever they think is a solid solution, too.

To be clear submitting a patch to fix it is exactly what the author of the above reporter did.

>For our users in the US and Canada, Firefox can now save, manage, and auto-fill credit card information for you...

Can anyone explain why this feature would need to be region-locked? Are they doing something more than simply storing CC info locally?

Maybe it's synced with FF account ?

Probably compliance - haven't/yet/don't want to confirm that it's adhering to data protection/similar laws in multiple jurisdictions?

I'd suspect the need of local partnerships to curate the content.

Curate what content? How?

What recommendations show up. Someone needs to read the articles in order to recommend them, don't they? It'd be better if this someone is someone local who has the context.

Edit: The heck, I haven't read carefully the OP. Thought that the question is about Pocket.

I was so confused by your comment, haha. "Recommendations, not autofill? They're going to recommend a credit card and address for me?"

Mea culpa. Read "regional", mixed with the Pocket and german-speaking countries announcement and the rest is history.

I'd guess primarily language, the status page says their testing to ensure the right fields get filled.

We speak a kind of English over here in the UK too.

There are enough differences that could cause issues in form recognition, particularly with things like addresses, that it makes sense to separate the two for testing.

Canada is about as similar to the UK as it is to the US in this regard.

Localization. Think US zip code, for example.

Localisation has such (a) cruel spelling(s).

Smart people just spell it l10n.

Handwriting the "one" of ten: 1 or l?

lIOn? Like the big cat?

The better question: why does it need a gradual rollout?

I'm more interested in knowing how they determine where I am. Do this feature require a GPS-enabled device to activate?

Firefox already has code to determine your location, since it supports the Geolocation API for JavaScript (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...). I’m not sure how Firefox implements it, but on a device without a GPS, programs could determine your location from the list of nearby Wi-Fi access points or from your IP address.

> You can pause and play audio or video in Firefox right from your keyboard or headset, giving you easy access to control your media when in another Firefox tab, another program, or even when your computer is locked.

Yes :)

Some great updates in this release. Credit card saving and PDF filling will both be very useful for me. I've become used to the CC feature on Android and just last week was noting its absense in Firefox.

Note further down looks like PiP mode is also getting more enhancements soon. Hopefully some of the open tickets around remembering window position and resize borders being too hard to hit get addressed as well.

> Credit card saving and PDF filling will both be very useful for me

How is the credit card saving thing from a security perspective?

Seems on the one hand like a weird thing to let a browser keep track of for me, but maybe it's adequately protected to not be an issue.

It's e2e encrypted and synced with your Firefox account's password.

> How is the credit card saving thing from a security perspective?

One more threat vector to worry about (someone getting ahold of your password manager).

One less also (keyloggers). Unfortunately, I worry more about the first, so I won't use it, thanks (and already I know it by heart, anyway).

I'm far more worried about someone gaining access to my main email than my credit card. I cancel the old card and then there's fraud protection and consumer laws to help with credit card charges, and then I just get a new card and replace the old one. Getting access to my main email account is a whole difference can of worms (but thankfully not as immediately bad as it used to be with the proliferation of 2FA for difference services).

Fraud protection in the US is still a thing but in Europe more and more banks are stopping it. My bank said their insurance underwriter no longer offered the service.

> We have expanded our supported file types - .xml, .svg, and .webp - so files you’ve downloaded can be opened right in Firefox.

This is very welcome. Especially XML.

Hasn't XML opened in the browser since forever?

Maybe they're talking about default file associations, so you can do "Open with" on Win/Mac?

I've opened SVGs plenty of times as well, maybe something to do with file association?

Isn't this about the Android version? It says that here but perhaps it's because I was reading it on Android.

I really hope that this is is going to be a user-facing option and not hidden away in about:config (or not configurable at all). I already have a media player using global media shortcuts, thank you. Browsers need to stop assuming that they are the only app in the room.

I looked for a way to disable the media keys feature when it landed in Developer Edition and it seems to be only in about:config. The key is "media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled".

Oh well. I guess "having an actual media player that observes to media keys" is "very advanced PC usage" in the year 2020, so that fully justifies hiding it in about:config. Sad.

I'm starting to think that the concept of "files" is starting to be a very advanced concept for some people these days.

If the OS is worth its salt it knows which media player is playing and lets you control it. I don't see how this could ever be a problem. It is no different than having two mediaplayers installed. I have never seen the wrong mediaplayer suddenly being controlled. Just set whatever as standard/default. Works fine in Android, Linux and Windows.

On Android you can't (almost always) play multiple media at the same time, so that's not an issue. The first media will pause when you start the next. However this is a stupid limitation, only plausibly appropriate for phones.

On computers you frequently have multiple medias playing at the same time and it is not possible to control all of them with one set of media control keys. The OS can guess but will often get it wrong.

You have music playing in the background and you start a YouTube video and then hit pause. What gets paused? On my current system, it's (usually) the YT video in Firefox. This is wrong because I want to pause the background music so that I can listen to the video. On another system it might instead pause the background music. That is wrong because I wanted to pause/unpause the active YT video that I've been watching for the past 15 minutes. I ended up disabling Firefox's thingy in about:config because this gets pretty frustrating after a while.

I believe the operating system should handle determining which media player has "focus"? For example, I play music on iTunes and Spotify, and can control both with media shortcuts depending on which is being used in the background.

This Firefox fix allows Firefox to behave like any other app.

But that's the entire point of using global shortcuts - I never have my media player focussed. I specifically had to enable global media shortcuts in it and Firefox should do the same: ask the user if they want this feature, and not assume that no other application might want to get hold of a global resource. As always, the mind game "what happened everyone did it like that?" is very important here.

Anyway, I just got the Firefox update and it seems like my media player seems to "win" over the global shortcut from Firefox that I didn't ask for. So all is good for now...

That's why I put "focus" in quotes. It's not in the forefront, but the OS remembers which media player has control.

At least on KDE media focus is first come first serve. The first media player to start playing gets the media keys until it stops and then whatever else is playing or plays next gets them.

The only unintuitive part is that maybe it should first try to play / pause the active window before delegating to that priority.

List of web platform changes to Gecko: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

> You can pause and play audio or video in Firefox right from your keyboard or headset

You could already do that, if you turned on those options from about:config. You can also turn on the forward button for skipping to the next song.

The two settings were:

- media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled = true

- dom.media.mediasession.enabled = true

Does this mean integration with AirPods will work now as well?

Not sure what you mean, but my AirPods have been working fine with Firefox, including the double tap for skipping to next song gesture. Provided that you have those options enabled.

To make it clear, I mostly listen to YouTube Music in Firefox. If the website has support for media keys, then it should work.

I mostly mean pausing and playing when taking them out or switching devices. Currently when watching YouTube videos the audio just starts playing on speaker. Will try out these options and see if that fixes it.

Sadly, the new PDF viewer still doesn’t support smooth two-finger zooming on macOS. The new theme is kind of neat though.

This release feels so much faster to me than 80. The snappiness of UI and webpage loading.

Thanks for all your work Firefox devs!

I immediately updated for the media controls. I hate getting a call and having to fumble around trying to scroll around and find the tab with the little speaker on it so I can stop it before answering.

Is there any way to change the default dark/light themes for Firefox on macOS yet? I don't like the 'Default' theme but I do like the 'Light' theme, so when I use dark mode I want Firefox to use the 'Dark' theme but then change to 'Light' when i go back to light mode and not the 'Default' theme. Is this possible? If not is it in the pipeline anywhere?

Other than that, Firefox is incredible and I'm always happy to see new updates.

You can set it to the Light theme and install the Dark Reader extension, which, in addition to making all the websites dark-moded, also changes the browser chrome's colors while active.

Firefox has been a joy to use under linux with wayland, it is smooth, fast, can handle hundreds of tabs (I use tree style tabs).

I have only one issue, is that copy past is broken under wayland: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1631061

I rhink its actually gtk which developers think is doing it right?

I have not digged deep into this bug, and I am not able to reproduce it, when it happen "I don't have time for it", so I just restart firefox, so I am not sure. But I had this bug only with firefox. But that doesn't say anything because firefox is one of the only GTK app I keep running for very long period of time.

Firefox is my browser of choice and I gladly appreciate much of the improvement the devs put in it. However under Linux an improvement would be to get rid of Pulseaudio and to directly interface with ALSA. The benefit would be that installing FF wouldn't require unwanted dependencies and audio quality would be improved.

I believe on Gentoo you can compile Firefox without pulseaudio by disabling the USE flag. I'm not sure if that forces it to use ALSA or disables audio entirely though. I do use pulse, so I've never disabled it globally/for Firefox.

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/www-client/firefox

https://packages.gentoo.org/useflags/pulseaudio

>and audio quality would be improved

Only one audio stream at a time can use ALSA, how would that be an improvement?

I don't have PA on my system and I am able to play audio from many sources at the same time using ALSA only. Not sure if this requires hardware/driver support or something, I don't have any special ALSA config.

I don't know about the audio quality improvement though, unless OP is talking about avoiding latency that comes from going through PA.

You may have hardware support or dmix in your config.

I avoided PA for years because "alsa just works". It is not until one tries to build a native linux app that you see the issue with alsa once you venture into the alsa library docs.

Indeed, alsa only supports one audio stream. This was the purpose of all the other sound daemons (arts, esd, etc) of times past. Alsa added "native" software mixing via a "dmix" [0] plugin. The end user is left with a setup that can handle multiple streams to a single sound card, however, one looses the ability to better tune how those streams are mixed.

For instance, most sound cards only support sample rates of 48khz. What happens when you have one application playing 44.1khz 16bit sound with another playing 44.1khz 32bit all while something else is playing 48khz sound? Dmix will resample and mix them into one 48khz stream, but it does so in the sloppiest way. It can be tuned somewhat, but that just makes the application linked into the alsa library consume even more CPU cycles.

Pulseaudio is much more better in this situation. It can change its sample rate on the fly. For the above scenario, it could have upsampled the one 44.1khz 16bit stream to 32 bit, and resampled the 48khz stream to 44.1khz and then piped this single 44.1khz stream to the sound card (if it supports 44.1khz audio) at much better efficiency and less work. There is really no reason to fight it anymore.

[0]: https://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Asoundrc#dmix

ALSA supports software mixing (dmix) for more than 15 years and uses it as a default output for more than 10 years.

Both Firefox and Chromium can be built without PA support so that they use ALSA directly.

The hate for PA is as unqualified as it was for systemd. Time will tell.

I don't hate it, it just randomly stops working for me.

Tis true. Now and then,

pulseaudio -k

Have they made it any easier to disable the ‘megabar’?

https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...

Edit: Added link

what is the megabar?

That addressbar grows extra margins after clicking, making it look like some layout bug. Also it fully expands automatically, even after single click.

Could anyone link to the APK for the Android version, please? I can't find it on Mozilla's servers. Thank you and thanks to all involved in Firefox!

edit: I mean how to download without the Play store? the support docs seem outdated

Looks like the versioning scheme is completely different: https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mobile/releas... only goes up to 68.11 and even that one is from July (the URL came from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-android-r... which even for nightly shows 68.5(?!))

As best I can tell, they really, really want you to get it from the Play store, which correctly lists the 81 version number: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...

I believe there are extensions which allow one to download apks from the Play store, but I've never tried them

F-Droid is similarly crazy: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/ with an issue about it still unaddressed https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2161

I'd guess you'll have to build 81 yourself, or investigate those Play store extractors

The Wikipedia page [1] has this jump from 68.11.0 to 79.0. The version scheme just changed to get consistent with Firefox for desktop AFAICT.

I don't know of a trustworthy extension to download APKs from the Play store. I'm reluctant to let one access my Google account indeed.

Regarding "their" intention, I'm mostly afraid the person who maintained the FTP got laid off.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_Android#Release_hi...

The reason for the big jump is that they were mainly working on the preview version and that went live with version 79 :)

Looks like they're normally uploaded to Github, but the last release with them there is 80.1.2.

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/releases/

Thanks a lot! That's a better than nothing alternative.

Does anyone know if Firefox supports --app= type mode yet, like Chrome does? I want to fully switch to Firefox, but I use Chrome's app mode all the time.

Breaking news: apps are still in the process of being deprecated in Chrome.

In Chrome "general support for Chrome Apps will end in June 2021', https://9to5google.com/2020/08/10/chrome-apps-deprecation/

I believe the parent is talking about Application shortcuts. The chrome "Kiosk" mode that allows you to create a shortcut on your desktop that opens any URL as a "WebApp".

I don't think this is being depreciated.

Yes, that's what I meant. :)

It does. Set browser.ssb.enabled to true in about:config.

A courtesy warning that this is hidden in about:config because it's still unstable.

As far as I can tell, kiosk mode does pretty much the same thing.

firefox -kiosk [URL]

Close, yet so far. Kiosk opens in fullscreen mode, no window controls. Chrome's --app opens a normal desktop window but without browser controls so that it looks like a desktop app.

I don't know what desktop environment/window manager you are using, but in i3 I can just press $mod+f to exit fullscreen and it will appear as a normal desktop app.

hum, standard XFCE for me. I tried only F11 (default shortcut to enter/exit fullscreen and did not work) but Alt-F11 did the trick. Nice.

> You can pause and play audio or video in Firefox right from your keyboard

Doesn't seem to work for me on Windows 7 (while working on Chrome on Youtube, Soundcloud and a side project of mine).

Basically navigator.mediaSession still returns undefined.

edit: it's win8.1 and above.

The linked documentation (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/control-audio-or-video-...) mentions that this is only supported on Windows 8.1 or newer.

It does, thanks I missed it skimming the page.

That's still hiding behind the pref. But the media keys support would be ebabled by default on Fx81, and support for media session would be enabled by default on Fx82.

The pref for media keys : media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled The pref for media session : dom.media.mediasession.enabled

See more details on https://bit.ly/2WJDEY0

Thanks for listing the pref so I can disable the darn thing. I don't currently see a user facing setting.

Used to work fine many years ago using an addon. Of course the addon is mostly broken since the demise of XUL.

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

Firefox for life

Is it bad I found a typo in the release notes? "aded"

Very purple new theme!

You can create your own with the Firefox Color official extension:

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

Very nice, I usually use a dorky space theme and this new one is a bit too purple (IMO) for readability so I may try to make a hybrid of the two themes.

I keep hoping to see "font rendering looks better on Windows" in one of these releases. I don't think it'll ever happen though.

Is there some API or technique that you're wanting implemented? Or is ClearType misconfigured on your machine?

Edit: the Control Panel has a Cleartype wizard that works like an optometrist exam: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/80598-turn-off-cleartype...

I think he refers to the slightly "biggening" of fonts.

Which is a great thing, btw! because it helps with all that nonsense-designers-bs of suuuuper thin fonts nobody can actually read.

They're not "biggened". They're bolder and more blocky. Which from a design perspective appears louder, more brash, and not calm.

DirectWrite does have some improvements over GDI only ClearType. Although a lot of DirectWrite's real improvements people notice are interestingly in the other direction. (ClearType is designed to optimize sub-pixel rendering on LCDs when rendering fonts at small sizes; a bunch of DirectWrite improvements are in multi-pixel aliasing and smoothing when rendering higher font sizes on higher DPI devices.)

That wizard is amazing, thank you!

And I hope it stays the way it is. I always found Firefox font rendering to be much more readable and easy on the eyes than Chrome's, to a point that most Electron software felt terribly blurry to me until they slightly improved it.

I spend most of my time on the following computers:

* "retina" Macs at 16" and 27"

* Windows laptop at 13"-ish and 3000x2000

* Mac and Windows at 24" and 1920x1200

All of these look fine to me, except for Windows at 1920x1200. I don't know if Firefox is especially bad, but that's my primary browser.

I wish I could better articulate what's wrong with it, but I don't think it's fixable with the ClearType tuner. It may just come down to preference--I use Macs more, so I prefer their font rendering.

> I wish I could better articulate what's wrong with it, but I don't think it's fixable with the ClearType tuner.

This is the frustration. Quite simply, I don't think anyone at Mozilla uses Windows.

I've tried to go to Firefox from Chromium, but the psychological impact that font rendering has on me is too much. I mean, we spend a lot of time reading text in a browser. I want that to be delightful and easy on the eyes.

Chromium-based browsers are actually the odd ones out here.

Maybe they're odd, but they look much better to me. Firefox text feels loud and anxious in comparison.

I install all addons that are in tor-browser :)

I wish they'd make the URL bar expandable

Firefox may have to eventually switch to Chromium, just like Microsoft did for Edge. I've noticed more and more sites not working or breaking with Firefox. It's bad enough now that I switch to Chrome when doing anything important. It's a sign that companies and developers are starting to accept that testing on Firefox is optional.

I'm not sure what the difference is between sites "not working" and "breaking", but as a counter point, I've seen neither in the past three or four years of exclusively using Firefox as my web browser.

As yet another counter point, I haven't had any problems with any site either. Actually, I think I haven't had any real problems with any site in Firefox since the IE6 days.

Been using Firefox forever, since it was called Firebird, migrated to it from Netscape at some point.

I use Firefox almost exclusively.

One example of a page that doesn't work is Amazon's "Today's Deals"[1] page.

[2] is screenshots of the same page in Firefox (top) and Chrome (bottom). I do have uBlock Origin installed but disabled for Amazon.

[2] https://imgur.com/a/VBNrKpS

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/goldbox?ref_=nav_cs_gb

That page works fine in my FireFox (v81 on Windows, also with uBlock Origin enabled). Have you checked the behavior with a clean profile?

I agree with this, except for different reasons. Without a good source of funding Mozilla won't have the resources to keep up with new requirements in the web stack. The current Firefox rendering engine isn't going to last forever and the Servo layoffs suggest Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do the R&D to keep up. Without R&D any non-monopoly product is a dead man walking.

I think Firefox's best shot for relevance is to switch from being a complete browser codebase and into being a maintained patch set for Chromium that retains user-focused features (such as adblock APIs and limits on media autoplay) as they are removed by Google. The required resource commitment would be far lower and might be viable in the long run.

And in this scenario you expect Mozilla to be able to influence web standards how, exactly?

How do you see a browser with less than ten percent market share as being able to influence web standards now?

That ship has already sailed.

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