Firefox Release Includes Total Cookie Protection and Multiple Picture-in-Picture
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433
E: saved you a click on my own link. In about:config you can disable this by setting the following to false
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites
For a more straightforward statement, try this HN post relaying one user's correspondence with the Mozilla Foundation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20895624
And it's still Firefox: if you're upset enough to consider "migration to a different browser", why not instead get upset enough to just look up the pref that turns them off? Because that's the whole point of Firefox: you're still in control of your browser, and almost everything is yours to set to your liking, even if it's not in the normal options UI. Don't want those ads? Hit up about:config, turn them off, problem solved?
And in the mean time, Mozilla still needs your help, because breaking today's Chrome dominance by offering a better product (not just a competing one. People don't switch if the offering is more of the same) is orders of magnitudes more difficult than when they broke IE's dominance many decades ago.
More importantly, it's not just ads. This is another example in a long line of conveniently whoops-didn't-mean-to thumbs in the eyes of users. Mozilla has this weird split-brain, one step forward two steps back mentality when it comes to building and fighting for their users.
It's exhausting to see this pattern play out over and over, so it absolutely makes sense that people will eventually get fed up with it and stop donating.
The forward people and the backward people are probably different people.
It also feels weird to donate to have an ad-free, privacy first, open source browser and get ads in it.
> And it's still Firefox: if you're upset enough to consider "migration to a different browser", why not instead get upset enough to just look up the pref that turns them off?
Default settings matter. "Just turn it off" is not a valid suggestion in my opinion.
If Mozilla is going broke, ask for donations by all means! Slap ads all over Firefox by all means.
Get my consent first though, eh? Give me a chance to open my wallet before you start ruining the only reason I interact with your company.
Can I note this is not the first time Firefox had made people think they've been hacked for monetary gain. I also disabled any and all checkboxes that involved being experimented on which they have ignored for this one.
Remember when they promised it wouldn't happen again? I do.
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-investigates-mr-robot-fire...
This is the exact businessmodel of Brave. So apparently is is not that strange a suggestion.
You're talking of Bitcoin donations, right? ;-)
If Facebook made 32.03 per user last year, I think it's fair to say that Mozilla will probably do even better if they offer an ad-free subscription option for e.g. 36/y across their entire suite of services.
It's not weird to expect Mozilla to do their best to try and remain solvent.
Near 100% of Mozilla users would agree to get the $36/year subscription?
> Near 100% of Mozilla users would agree to get the $36/year subscription?
No, not at all.
And I'm surprised at how many downvotes this is getting, but the basic concept is that at $36/y, each person paying that amount will assuredly be donating more to Mozilla than Mozilla would be making from ads on that user. I couldn't find any numbers on what Mozilla makes from ads, but I'd be surprised if it approached what Facebook makes per user.
I have nothing against straight ads.
I do. They are actively hostile to the user experience. I will criticise any update to software that deliberately makes the user experience worse.
It probably doesn't help that you can't choose to donate to/for Firefox. If you disagree with other things Mozilla is doing, perhaps moreso than the things you agree with, then you don't really have much options.
For many people, advertisements - especially ones enabled without announcement, sneakily - are simply an unacceptable red line, nomatter how important Mozilla thinks they are.
I should also add that I never disable any telemetry in Firefox or anything that helps them earn a cent or two (as long as it does not abuse my privacy too much, and there were not a lot of those during 15+ years of using Firefox exclusively.)
Personally I don't mind at all if Mozilla wants to display ads in Treeherder or in their corporate offices, I wouldn't even feel like I want to pay to remove those :)
My point being, I don't expect firefox donations would amount to very many millions, but it's important to note that today the option doesn't really even exist.
Don't.
If that means not doing further development, great. Leave that to people who want to make the software better, not worse.
If you can find a way to monetise software, that's fantastic, but if that monetisation requires degrading quality I have no respect for it.
You mean apart from Pale Moon, Basilisk, Waterfox, Tor, XB, Iceweasel, Swiftfox, Swiftweasel, Cometbird, and IceDragon?
Yeah no idea why that thing that has happened several times hasn't happened.
Why? It's almost always noise nobody wants to see. Advertising hurts usability by definition. Putting ads in the address bar of all places is actually hostile to users: people who are used to finding bookmarks that way will end up opening sponsored links instead due to muscle memory.
Now I am older and tired of doing the symlinking every time I setup a new install of Ff.
I've been moving around the same firefox install since Opera died.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752
It's a slow and steady advance, not something that happens overnight.
If mozilla is moving towards expanding advertising in FF from the developer, then they're changing their incentive structure in a way that makes putting ads in front of my eyes against my wishes more and more beneficial to them.
I can't see this as a good step forward. It only leads to places where they're incentivized to make the browser worse to make more money.
I also have nothing against straight ads. Who knows how Mozilla will implement this though, and whether it will be more annoying than useful. I have some suspicions, but I'll reserve judgement until I've experienced them, since I sometimes have a hard time predicting correctly (as I suspect many people do) because the topic is somewhat emotionally charged.
Deleted comment
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites
It's apparently being trialed to a limited subset of users.
And so far it's a bug that has an off-switch. Best kind. Much obliged for the documentation.
AFAICT, Firefox (Mozilla Corporation) wants dumb users, an expanding platform they control and ad money.
There is no way to donate for Firefox development, nor can you pay for support, nor specific development or feature requests. People would throw money at them, yet they try finding creative ways to monetize their users in an effort to "diversify sources of income".
Meanwhile they continue to show they are in control of your browser - ignoring user preferences, hotpatching, A/B tests, dozens of requests without a single page open and no way to disable, numerous ways of advertising...
I still consider Firefox the lesser evil, but the stage is ripe for an uprising.
To confirm I disabled all plugins immediately to ensure it was bog standard Firefox (which is why I was so irritated at the time, proper threw off my day).
Bonus it had the Amazon tracking code "admpdesktopuk-21", which if you do a search reveals a bunch of plugins that went rogue.
E: apologies I can't track down the source where I saw it was an ab test
Fortunately, this probably doesn't do any extra tracking. Unfortunately, that means my distribution (Debian) probably isn't going to protect me from these sort of features now and in the future, as I don't think this breaks the DFSG.
I wish I didn't have to be on the lookout for user-hostile change from an org like mozilla, one of the few big tech companies that tries to fight for users. I too would much rather pay for firefox development than see more ads in my browser :/
Geez almost like users don't want sponsored content in their address bar...
I don't think as a user its unreasonable for me to expect software vendors to do the right thing for me. Whether they do it or not is their choice, I'm still rightfully allowed to complain about it.
Hope they introduce an option to show a PiP icon on the address bar when a video is on the tab, which is less intrusive, like the Reader View icon/feature.
When the page has multiple videos, the icon can show options to PiP them individually or PiP them all.
Also users should still have the option to show the PiP button over each video.
It's not enabled by default (it's part of Strict privacy controls), but I think the heuristics it's using might be copied by other browser or extensions implementing similar features. I don't love the amount of "heuristics-based" features being added to browsers, since they're not always easy to discover as a developer, but it's certainly better than a whitelist/blacklist system like Google"s used for certain features. The console.log entries that article mentions should help a bit with debugging as well.
(Especially on tablets.)
- Switch to other tabs and still see the video
- Use the shortcuts of the native player same as for local video files
- Use all the features of the native player including better hardware acceleration
I guess this feature helps with the first of these while not requiring additional setup.
When playing video games I can use PiP to place a video on top of my fullscreen game.
Also for keeping covid press conferences open while I do other stuff. I could move the tab to a new window and then resize it to only show the video, but this is far less effort.
Same goes with using a chat feature while in a different meeting.
So the whole picture in picture to me is more distraction.
I'm glad to see some people find it valuable because I was failing to find its usefulness.
If I pop the video out via PiP, I can resize it to a comfortable inbetween size.
It's nice because PiP (at least Safari's/macOS' implementation) keeps the video above all other windows, and it even carries over into other Spaces.
In short: multitasking.
Why is Mozilla creating a special exception for Facebook (and Google) while those two are the worst privacy invaders?
It looks almost exactly the same to me, just a couple things shuffled around.
Anyway, I think it's perfect exactly how it is.
You can change the default in about:config media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.min-video-secs
I feel like it used to be 30 seconds, although I may be incorrect
It's only ~8% of the desktop market share and ~4% across all devices. It doesn't seem inconceivable sites just give up supporting it if they're not getting the ad revenue.
That just means I tell my colleagues I can't receive Slack audio calls and we use an alternative tool for that.
There is momentum in a choice like that though and even if Slack were to add Firefox support tomorrow we probably wouldn't switch to using them for audio.
They do offer an election based app for Linux but I'm not interested in that over head when I can just keep a browser tab open for Slack chat.
For me you either support open standards or you don't get used.
> But if Google does this properly and uses more sophisticated browser fingerprinting techniques, Epiphany is done for. This could be an existential threat for non-Safari WebKit browsers. Nobody is going to be interested in using a browser that doesn't support Google websites. Google's expressly-stated goal is to block embedded browser frameworks and non-supported browsers from signing into Google accounts. The blog post says: "This block affects CEF-based apps and other non-supported browsers." It says: "We do not allow sign-in from browsers based on frameworks like CEF or Embedded Internet Explorer."
[1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/...
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36
Firefox is great, major downsides for me are the lack of good shortcut (especially for macOS).
Running any of those on Firefox, vs. other browsers, is a lot hotter.
I did a post about it and according to Apple's "Energy Usage" Firefox was like 50x higher than Safari and 30x higher than Chrome on the same sort of streaming call.
Try it for yourself next time you're on a Zoom call.
Firefox is my browser of choice, but so annoying that they don't take battery use / optimization seriously.
You're also mixing up symptoms. If all browsers were forced to use the same rendering engine, you'd see little divergence of CPU/energy usage. The user is seeing a wild divergence—which is what you might expect when browsers are using different rendering engines.
You're also mixing up talking points. People have accused Safari of being many things, but being profligate with CPU/energy usage is certainly not one of them.
I want my Mac Hardware, it feels nice. I want to use Firefox, I trust it and I like that I can automatically clear cookies and history on close... The fact that Chrome pushes you to sign in is so fundamentally offensive to me. Just super-creepy. So I want Firefox on Mac, but I have no strong feelings towards Gecko one way or the other, if that's what's causing my computer to over heat... wish they'd just swap it out for Webkit.
Firefox/Gecko has an excellent rendering engine but Mozilla has often been late to the party with hardware acceleration on Mac.
It's also worth noting that Safari doesn't necessarily support all the same video codecs as Firefox, so for example Zoom might be using hardware accelerated h264 in Safari whereas in Firefox might use a more advanced codec (e.g. VP9) for which your MacBook might have no hardware acceleration capability. If this is the case, Firefox ought to give users the option to disable support for these non-accelerated codecs when running on battery power.
It's not a Webkit issue. The parent comment is confusing iOS with macOS and the rendering engine used by Firefox on macOS.