Firefox 86.0 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 86.0

mozilla.org

295 pointsLopRabbit181 comments

Wow, Ctrl+P has now started to open the proper print-interface with a preview! I've helped loads of people over the years complaining about printing in Fx vs Chrome. It used to be so in Fx that selecting Print from the menu opened an interface for printing (ala Chrome), but pressing Ctrl+P just opened standard OS print dialog. So power users never saw the nice print preview.

As someone who always used the Ctrl-P keyboard shortcut, I never even knew that a print-with-preview interface existed in Firefox.

It never even occured to me to use the menu version. What an upgrade

you guys made me read the menu shortcuts .. didn't know reader mode and all-tabs had them (in order CTRL-ALT-R and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB)

May I blow your mind? ;)

Ctrl-1 to Ctrl-8 accesses the first eight tabs directly, Ctrl-9 jumps to the last tab. Enjoy!

I didn't know about the Ctrl-9. Thanks.

I think you meant Alt-N and yeah I did know (don't even know how but I use it every day since forever..)

It'll be alt-n on mac's I think!

Try Tridactyl. You can access any tab directly with `b`.

I'm on Firefox 84, pressing file/print or ctrl-p brings up a preview window on the left, printer selection on the right.

The new print interface has been progressively released to a subset of users over multiple releases. It's only gone to 100% of users as of Firefox 86.

I guess I was in the early rollout. I was in the middle of designing a print layout about a month or two ago when firefox got updated. After a restart I suddenly was missing the print preview option in the menu to test my design. I was really glad to see that I could from now on just press Ctrl + P and get a much better experience.

it does not work here the `print.tab_modal.enabled` preference to `false´ fix described below helped

For those of us that prefer the OS print dialog, how can we stop this madness?

We intend to add a keyboard shortcut for this[1]. In the meantime you can revert to the old printing interface by setting the `print.tab_modal.enabled` preference to `false` via the page `about:config`. In a few releases time, after we've finished integrating user feedback and polishing rough edges, we intend to remove that preference though.

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1667950

We have an application using a web based PDF viewer (PDFTron) and printing PDFs has always been a pain point. That library supports "embedded printing" which only works on Chrome (https://www.pdftron.com/documentation/web/guides/print/overv...). So for now we're advising our customers to use Chrome for our application. Do you know if this is something being improved upon? Sorry this is a bit OT!

Offhand I'm not sure what functionality Firefox is missing that has caused them to only support Chrome. I'd be interested in taking a look though if you have their paid support and can persuade them to either file a bug[1] (or to give you sufficient technical information so that you can file a bug).

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...

Thanks! I'll get in contact with their support. Too late to edit my earlier post. The link to their embedded printing is: https://www.pdftron.com/documentation/web/guides/print/overv...

Why is Firefox, with its devotion to hearing the user's voice, always in such a hurry to remove toggles that express user preferences?

In the general case where that's true I expect it mostly comes down to trying to balance features against available resources and the amount/complexity of the code that needs to be written/maintained. As noted elsewhere in this thread, there were a bunch of layoffs at Mozilla the last year, but even without that it's sometimes necessary to make tough, pragmatic decisions.

In the case of the new print preview/workflow, however, I expect it will provide virtually everyone with a better workflow once we've finished polishing any rough edges. The feedback on places like Reddit indicates that it's already a very clear net win for most users, and I think we can address most of the complaints on support.mozilla.org etc. The eventual removal of the `print.tab_modal.enabled` preference and the old code will simply be because having two print preview implementations adds code complexity and is a maintenance burden.

Thank you for the reply, which you must get tired of giving but which you nonetheless gave politely.

I understand that the needs of any one user, such as me, with a particular idiosyncratic set of needs and preferences are at odds with those of the body of users as a whole, who need an appropriate balance between customiseability and useability, together with, of course, deliverability—it's no good having a product custom-tailored to fit every possible combination of needs if the developers collapse under the maintenance weight.

I didn't really mean what I said as anything other than a cri de cœur: it sometimes seems that Firefox rode to its current position on the wave of the love and passion of power users, a group of which I am on the periphery, but now cares more about its numerically larger but less devoted casual user base. This is probably the right decision, but it's still frustrating as one of those long-time users (from back in the Phoenix days!).

No problem, and as a Mozilla user/contributor since the early Mozilla Suite days I sympathize with your cri de cœur. Power users had and will always have an outsized influence on Mozilla's market share and thus relevance and ability to fulfill its mission. At the same time performance, polish and usability need to keep up with the competition to keep the less technical majority. It's a tough balancing act when resource constrained.

thanks, this helped , things went back to 'working'

There is an option to print using the system dialog on the right panel after you press COMMAND + P

There's a link to the OS print dialog in the new print preview view (not perfect, but better than nothing if you prefer it)

:( So there's no way to just default to that? In chrome there's a `defaults write` command that does it.

I really dislike this philosophy of replacing the system functionality. Particularly on Mac where the system functionality is quite good. (On Windows and Linux, I admittedly don't care as much, because nothing is ever consistent anyway...)

Reminds me of that: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Wow. I switched to Firefox around the same time I switched a Mac for work, and just assumed the lack of print preview was a weird macOS thing.

This makes me happy.

Actually, you were correct. Firefox on Windows and Linux has provided a print preview "since forever", but this is the first time Firefox has had print preview functionality on macOS (outside of using the system print dialog to generate and open a PDF in the Preview app).

Right. I just assumed Chrome and Safari also lacked print preview on macOS, didn't even think to check.

fwiw Firefox always had a print preview; it was just behind a different shortcut rather than integrated into the default flow.

The old Print Preview actually allowed you to inspect the page with the Developer Tools. Which was great for debugging print-specific CSS. I don't think that's possible with the new Print Preview, but the new one is better in every other way.

Should be possible using the Browser Toolbox to inspect the entire interface? I just checked and the HTML is definitely in the inspector at least, but I'm not sure what your requirements are.

What do you mean by "Browser Toolbox"? Firefox doesn't have Chrome's @media (print) emulation.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Browser_Toolb...

The Browser Toolbox is the normal DOM inspector, just extended to the whole user interface. If you open the print preview, then open the Browser Toolbox, you can inspect the preview and edit styles just like any other document.

Also, @media print {} works fine, I just tested it. But I'm not sure how that relates to the original question.

https://imgur.com/a/S6XryYW screenshot of browser toolbox with the print preview DOM visible + site with @media print background color change. Note that you need to expand "More settings" in the print preview and enable "Print backgrounds" for that specific test to work.

I would have literally never discovered that without this post. I honestly forgot there was a File->Print button until I read this. Ctrl/cmd+P is jus burned into my muscle memory.

Oh my god! I've never seen the proper print interface and always assumed Mozilla simply didn't care about printing.

I noticed that! I've been using the print preview from the File menu (a bit cumbersome with menus hidden and without a dedicated shortcut) and noticed that I didn't have the option this week.

I seem to remember the controls for page fit being a little better with the old print preview, but my real complaint is with websites that don't scale well to print rather than Firefox's method of printing them.

They really should have option to match chrome shortcuts and windows.

Ctrl+Shift+N works in Chrome but in Firefox its Ctrl+Shift+P.

This doesn't appear to be new in 86. I'm on 85 and it has preview when I hit Cmd+P.

> Firefox now supports simultaneously watching multiple videos in Picture-in-Picture.

Is Adderall the new Aspirin? Or is there some WFH use here that I'm missing.

While I usually limit myself to one video playing on the computer, when following live events it can happen that you want to have two streams running. E.g. the multiple channels streaming the Starship test flights or watch one video while waiting for another stream to come online.

I was exactly thinking about the Starship test flights for this. I think that's the only time I've ever had more than a single video playing at once.

For a serious answer, here's some links:

https://w3c.github.io/picture-in-picture/

https://github.com/w3c/picture-in-picture/blob/master/explai...

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/10/watch-vide...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1463402

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5729206566649856

Looks to me like it is a standard that web devs requested (e.g. so you can scroll down YouTube or whatever and the video will keep playing in the corner), which Firefox chose to also make an end-user UI for.

I think the parent is primarily referring to the multiple aspect of it (PiP was already supported).

Sports immediately comes to mind - Some people I know who are really big into sports like watching/keeping track of multiple games at once.

Not only multiple games, but also multiple viewpoints of the same game. Twitch added support for that use case for esports (I think as part of their deal with Overwatch League).

This is a game changer for sports bettors.

Me personally, will probably stick to one video playing in the background. It's more for ambient noise. On days when there are 4 nba games going on simutaneously, I'm far too busy fiddling with my spreadsheet/nba feed to be actually watching the game.

I watched NASA's stream of Perseverance landing on Mars. It would have been cool to watch a few different landings streams at once since one had good narration and another had better footage.

I never understood this feature either. I can already make multiple browser windows if I want. Definitely not interested in PIP.

I shared the initial reaction the first time I heard about it but completely changed my mind after using it. The big win is for poorly designed sites like YouTube which use non-standard controls and waste a significant majority of the space. I have hot keys to resize windows to screen quarters or halves but for anything less than full screen on my laptop a YouTube video will have less than half of the window devoted to the actual content and the browser chrome will reduce that even further.

If there’s something I’m watching but not giving my full attention to - say an event hasn’t started yet or someone will be landing a rover on Mars in an hour - this means that I can either have a big chunk of my screen wasted or I can use PiP and have just the thing I care about using a quarter of the space but showing considerably more of the actual content.

Plus, it uses well-tested standard controls so I don’t have to play games figuring out whose <script> kiddies don’t think about keyboard shortcuts or test their event handlers.

I like that I can scale the video as I want. Like on a news-site the only options are often a small inline viewer or full screen. So I use PIP often for that even though I'm staying on the page.

And it's just more convenient than trying to maximize the space of another browser window and making it stay put above other stuff. No extra chrome, no wasted inline space on the page. I can just take a Blender tutorial for instance and move directly above my Blender window and it obscures as little as possible.

Most web pages only support two video sizes:

1. unusably small 2. full screen. Which often means unusably large (27" screen), especially for less-than-HD videos

At least youtube added at some time the cinema mode which allowed the video to occupy the whole window width, that is what I use most of the time. Still, PIP also has the advantage of removing the window decorations, so saving space. Also, they are floating on top of all other windows, which helps, but also occasionally can be annoying.

Browser windows have decorations that take space. I don't use PIP often, but it comes in handy when I have limited screen real estate, like watching Netflix on my sidearm in tablet mode, while simultaneously doing something on the web.

This is something better solved at the window manager level. E.g. what if I want to have a PIP in my Xterm?

Sure, if you have a window manager that solves the problem that's great. The rest of the world can use Firefox's inferior integration while they wait for their window manager to get that feature.

How does a window manager get rid of Firefox's browser chrome?

For me it makes the fullscreen videos cover only the Firefox window, so they effectively can serve as PIP windows. To be honest, I have no idea how to enable it outside of XMonad, it just worked like this on XMonad many years ago when I switched to it and I actually liked this behavior so here we are.

Right but xmonad is very idiosyncratic in that behaviour. I don't know of any other window manager that behaves like that, and while it seems useful in Firefox, it doesn't make much sense to ignore fullscreen requests from an application like mpv which has no chrome anyway, or say a video game which expects to be fullscreen and doesn't know how to dynamically scale its UI down when the window isn't the size it expects.

PiP seems to be a cleaner solution.

Answer: it doesn't.

The problem is browsers have two layers of decoration: the WM layer (which tiling window managers tend to remove), and the internal layer - the tab bar, address bar, option buttons, borders, etc.

As far as I know, there isn't a way to remove all that without going full screen.

In the very first version of firefox with full screen mode it ended up doing just that, rendering full screen inside a normal window area in my tiling WM. It was likely a bug/unimplemented feature at that stage, but to be honest it would have been nice to have as an option prior to pip.

PIP also has pin-on-top feature, I believe letting you place the video in a corner over an expanded, in-focus application.

Following along with a tutorial would be a big use case.

I don't get it either, personally, but I remember reading around high school (90s) a book called "Boost your Brainpower" or something like that. They mostly recommended lots of visualization (they said the trick is to say out loud what you are seeing to improve) but also had a suggestion to watch multiple televisions at the same time, suggesting it would be helpful in some way or another that I have long since forgotten. I never tried any of those, but hopefully in a decade we'll be reading about "the browser feature that boosts your brainpower" and not "the browser feature that made the amphetamine crisis even worse".

I have a fitlet running a pygtk 4screen vlc showing me 3 news networks and a music stream on my 3rd monitor. I can click each one to mute/unmute, mousewheel up/down to change the relative volume, and the entire thing is compeltely separate from my

I can have 4 different sources on at the same time (music in the background - quiet, one of the news channels a bit louder if I'm waiting for something to happen, a corporate all-hands zoom call I'm half listening to on the main computer, and maybe a short video or meme, it's usually 2 or 3 though.

I don't use pip much as the one site I'd use it on (twitter) works hard to stop the video playing as you scroll down anyway.

Following a group of streamers at the same time is ideal for this. Currently you need to use 3rd party services.

When I watched YouTube regularly I would often have multiple videos going. Some people talk slowly and YouTube encourages filler in order to hit the 10 minute mark. When most of the videos are like this you can definitely have a couple monologues, some music, and something to read just fine.

You can speed up videos on Youtube. Both natively and with yuotube-dl then play locally with mpv or your (lesser) favourite player.

This was less clicks and faster.

Clicking on the gear in the youtube player allows you to set playback speed. Most videos are very watchable on 1.25x or 1.5x speed, on videos that are basically just filler with some information in between I even go to 2x

I have two, as yet unsolved, work from home use cases:

- I often would like to watch one team member update Trello or Mural, at the same time as another updates Github, while I update a contract. I'd move those streams to my 4k monitor, to keep them readable, while I work on my primary.

- If I'm running a demo to a client, I'd like to have one stream sharing the demo platform, while another shares video of my haggard face, and a third shows my presentation. I don't want to share my whole desktop, to avoid sharing slack or SMS notifications.

OBS can probably do #2. Nothing does #1.

My browser history is NCSA Mosaic->Netscape->Firefox. Even when Firefox had its downs I stuck with it. Not sure why. It just felt right. It was always perfect for me.

The only thing I miss are subtitles in Picture-in-Picture mode.

This. There maybe are some downsides to Firefox but it still feels better than chrome. I'm staying with it

Yup. I will say though, as someone that never left FF, the new Edge is really good on Windows. I'm impressed. Edge is missing some features that make browsing for me, a far more enjoyable experience though. For Firefox, "It just feels right" is the best way to put it.

Here's the Firefox bug for Picture-in-Picture subtitles. Unfortunately there has not much progress.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551058

Skipped over Phoenix?

What I'd like to see in a browser is a button which resets it to the UI from Firefox 1.0 [1]

OS-provided window border and titlebar

Standard menubar with keyboard hints, always displayed

Five buttons: Back, forward, reload, stop, home

Address bar and separate search field

Status bar which shows me link URL when I hover a link

[1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/mozilla-f...

Personally, these days I use a keyboard-driven browser without any of that stuff, just the frame, vertical tabs on the right, and a status bar. But for people in my friends and family circle, I think that interface would be infinitely more functional and productive than anything else I've seen.

Go to Menu -> Customize.

Tick "Title Bar"

Drag & Drop the "search" widget aside your URL bar

Drag & Drop the Five buttons you mention where you want

You're welcome.

(for the status bar URL link preview on hover it's already the case by default)

However, the status bar is no longer persistent, but only appears when hovering over a link. Also in the past you used to be able to control the text in the status bar via the window.status variable in JavaScript. This was disabled as it was used for malicious purposes (faking link destinations and misleading users by putting page-controlled content in the browser chrome), and after that there didn’t seem much point to wasting 20–30px of precious vertical space all the time.

I would also note that the address bar and search box got merged for a good reason, because their functionalities steadily converged over time as the address bar became more powerful and useful. You can still have them split if you really want, but it is unlikely to actually benefit most people.

And have it all reverted at random because well "there seems to be along time since you last used Firefox, do you want to lose all your configurations? Yes. Later."

Each time I see that prompt I have to pause and consider the otherwise wacky theory that there evil forces trying to cripple Mozilla from the inside.

Why. Just why.

It's hard to try to come up with another explanation, to be honest. When I try imagine how incompetence can explain everything that's happened with Firefox in the past several years, it feels like I'm going for the gold in the mental gymnastics world championship.

I dunno. Software often have very unintuitive features, like the problem of closing with CTRL-Q on Linux, that looks like a "damn, why did they put it there on the first place", but actually is something GTK does if you follow the guidelines (what goes to show that most software doesn't follow them).

My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

>My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

I think this is actually a good feature, one of the few introductions which I think if worthwhile, even if the implementation is a bit lacking.

You have to balance the user being able to see the message with not annoying them, and it's not difficult to achieve.

Configuration bloat is a real problem in most applications which allow third-party extensions, and I've seen some stunning examples of extensions bloat on some people's computers, Chrome users included. On the other hand, when I question it, they tell me, "I use all those!"

This article I came across here on HN really enlightened me: https://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html

Hum... Keep in mind that there is no option to not erase your configurations. And that "configurations" has a very bread sense, including everything from about:config settings, themes, extensions, history, cache, cookies, saved passwords, and even for a short period including bookmarks (thankfully that one they stopped erasing). And, by the way, Firefox will revert from a backup if you are logged in into an account, what is probably the reason the devs didn't nuke this by themselves, but also leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories and user enragement.

Having a button somewhere where the user can go and reset those things is ok. But keeping pestering them until they click on the button is really not.

Thanks for clarifying that, I have seen the dialog before, but never investigated what it actually does.

It sounds like something which started out as a good idea and was then steered into user abuse territory.

Thank you for your reply. Your suggested solutions are not complete, however.

The status bar is not persistent.

Also, for whatever reason, the URLs displayed in the status bar are cut off with an ellipsis, even when they would fit inside the window.

The menu bar -- File, Edit, View, etc. -- is still not displayed. And when it is displayed, the keyboard accelerators are not. I do realize this is in part the window manager and OS's accomplishments.

By the way, most of the actions you described are not even possible without using the mouse. Firefox, and most desktop applications, used to be 100% accessible without using the mouse. (Mac has always been an exception, but it was covered 100% on Windows and close to complete on GNU.)

I just want the disconnect button. It used to sit in status bar. I don't want to fetch things when I am reading downloaded articles.

Remember when browsers would actually cache pages and not reload them every time you accidentally blinked or moved the mouse cursor?

Should drop CSS support while they're at it.

You can turn off CSS in many browsers. It is under the Accessiblity dialog in IE, at least in 6.x. Firefox also supports disabling CSS in older versions, and so does Opera before the crippling WebKit migration.

I can't imagine it being that difficult to implement as a feature. If the setting is on, you would skip interpreting any <style> tags and style= attributes.

Past versions of many browsers support selecting between multiple stylesheets specified by the page, as well as provide your own stylesheet to use in place or in addition to the page's stylesheet.

(This was one of the main, amazing fucking benefits of CSS, to separate presentation from content, so that users who were hindered by the page's styles could turn it off and still be able to view the content.

And all of it works great if you do it right, because the styles cascade, and, I apologize for repeating myself, the content layer is separate from the presentation layer.

At some point all these features went away, 'cause fuck accessibility, I guess.

Meanwhile, CSS became Turing complete, so security-wise it's like having a second JavaScript which cannot be turned off.

Great progress all around. /s

When people ask me why I spend time on ensuring that I support older browsers in my projects, this is one of the reasons. Sometimes I just want to use a decent fucking browser that's not been lobotomized, and at least I can do it on my own sites.

Was View -> Page Style -> No Style removed for 86?

The menu is no longer there, AFAIK. I have not spent much time looking for the feature, to be honest, and I no longer keep Firefox installed except when testing, so I won't look for its existence now.

(I usually apt install before testing and apt remove after, because otherwise it often becomes the system default.)

Just checked. It's there.

Thank you

Everything you listed except for the status bar can be gotten by customising the UI in Firefox (not single-click but pretty easy).

On the other hand, if this is the kind of approach to UI you like personally, I think the Vivaldi browser would be up your alley (sadly not open-source though).

Sorry, but that is not even close to true, see my other comment describing what doesn't work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26276871

Vivaldi is OK, but it's proprietary AFAIK?

Can't imagine anyone being happier nowadays without tabs.

Firefox has had tabs since it was in beta (and called Phoenix); It's the reason I started using it back then (~2002)

Tabs were always there since before it was even called Firefox.

Presumably your application would just be creating new windows and your windowing system would take care of displaying it as either tabs or separate windows.

Did you ever use Firefox 1.0? It supported tabs.

I wonder if the web engine development pretty much stopped, or developer notes are just less detailed over the last year or so. Those are a shadow of the former self, certainly.

Under "developer" section there's a link with dev focused changelog

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

Note also that release schedule is now 4 weeks instead of 6 weeks. Hence each release might feel "smaller".

I was writing about those dev changelogs and not just this release...

it’s particularly aggravating that form fields have been largely stagnant over the past 20 years. so much repetitive development happens around forms (validations or date/time pickers, for instance) and yet very little effort goes into improving them.

I’ve noticed this too. I’ve found myself iterating on a nice extended form control library where I try to extend the native inputs and forms in the most minimal, yet complete, way I can.

There are actually a lot of nice improvements being discussed in the CSS level 4 specs, but some of the issues are last tagged as updated in 2012...

But basically we just need a consistent value interface (two-way data binding), and a more finely-grained validation/state lifecycle where we can plug in our own custom validation functions.

Colleagues and I always joke that every web developer gets the idea to write a form library at some point, and suffering through trying to implement it is the only way to dissuade them of the idea. Now the joke is on me as I’ve come full circle back to writing one.

I’ve spent so much time on it now I’ve been considering reaching out to help contribute to the spec. But I have no idea how receptive the working group is. This may just become my eternal project, there’s always more edge cases to find.

Microsoft are actually doing good in this space.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/10/15/form-controls...

Every effort to change or improve them will wreck most forms on the internet. Most websites heavily style them and augment them with scripts, which will almost certainly conflict with whatever is change in the browsers. This ship has sailed decades ago.

They did let go of a third of their staff about a year ago.

I know, all I wonder is whether engine development slowed down or changelog person was let go, or whatever.

Most of the Gecko group was left intact.

Yeah, I ended up looking through the git repo and things seem to be alive and well, if a bit attenuated compared to 2019.

Not totally related, but someone know if exist an RSS feed to follow the stable Firefox releases? Can't find it on this page.

This Firefox changelogs are awesome to know big improvements and new features on a surface level.

For Chrome I didn't find a proper way to follow the releases even if it has some RSS feeds, I follow the RSS feed of Chrome Releases blog [1] with a tag filter [2] but can't exclude the several point releases, and also the changelogs are not very informative [3]. And the Chrome blog [4] I get some feature announcements but is a mix bag.

[1] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com

[2] http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default...

[3] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2021/01/stable-channel...

[4] https://blog.google/products/chrome/

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/tags https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/atom-tags https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/rss-tags

And here's my lua script that uses notify-send to notify me of new releases: https://gist.github.com/folknor/32f703b270c6ad72bc12d98feb2f... I modified it slightly before posting it here, but it's mostly useless unless you're me :-D Because when I write shell scripts (which I always do in lua), I always use my fork of luash (from my github), and I don't imagine anyone else has it. It's easy enough to rewrite the script to not require it, though. Also, the other obscure dependency it uses is lua2xml, which is notoriously unreliable, but I still use it in all my shell scripts that interact with XML.

I forgot to mention: before running the script (as if anyone ever would), create a file called "notified" in the same folder with the content "85.0.0" without the quotes, or whatever recent firefox release version you want to build from. The script also needs to be able to write to this file.

I've updated the gist so it now can be used without my luash fork, and can be used with ((luash+curl) || luasec || lua-curl). Just for fun :-)

Interested myself, currently using https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/mozilla.announce/msgs/r... (https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.announce).

Thank you! That's perfect! And a bit ironic that the RSS feed is on a Google product aka the company that kill Google Reader.

Take a look at my reply to the OP

I wonder if Total Cookie Protection is unnecessary if I have First Party Isolation enabled already

It looks like TCP includes FPI, but isolates more data sources, like the storage APIs and Workers. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/02/introducing-state-partitio...

Firefox is the only option for mobile webdev since it's the only mobile browser with devtools. However I won't use it as my main browser because of insanely frequent (and pointless) major ui changes. It messes with your muscle memory. This isn't beta software, is it?

I use Firefox on Android all the time. When I occasionally open Chrome, I see the UI there changes quite often. Now it has tab groups. Maybe a month ago it changed the url bar.

> Now it has tab groups

It's hidden behind a right click menu. So it's a muscle memory friendly change. I don't remember the url bar change to be too disorienting either.

>So it's a muscle memory friendly change

It's not really. Now when you right click (long press) to open a link on a new tab it opens it in the same tab group as your tab. If you then use the button at the top to switch tabs (how it worked before), you are now switching tab groups. To switch tabs in your tab group, you have to do it at the bottom.

I'm not a webdev, but I think you can use the Desktop Chrome webviews to debug remotely. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/remo...

This should be possible on Firefox too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugg...

Safari on iOS kind of has devtools, but they're not available on the go, since you still need a desktop computer to access them. Enable the "web inspector" setting in iOS safari and the "show develop menu" in macOS (both in the advanced settings section). When you plug in the iOS device directly into the Mac, it'll show up in the Mac's Safari's develop menu. Unfortunately, this is completely useless if you don't have access to a mac or are away from your computer.

Doesn't chrome do the same? I used it last night, opened the history and that was considerably different.

In the last two years I only noticed: address bar can be on the bottom (user setting), open sites changed from tiles to a list. What other major UI changes have happened? (Or are you talking about desktop UI?)

> What other major UI changes have happened?

It's slow as molasses and loses UI events. I had auto-update turned off so I didn't use the new Firefox for Android until recently, and now I sincerely regret I updated it.

They also did something silly with trying to match your tap to closest link even if your tap falls squarely outside of the link's activation area. It's super annoying on sites with small text, like HN.

On the flip side, the UI being garbage made me stop browsing HN on my phone, so overall, perhaps that's an improvement in terms of my productivity.

On desktop, url bar click behavior. It was changed from full selection to cursor, and then reverted.

Yeah I just have a pinned beta apk from a while back that I will never, ever update.

Same with Firefox on Desktop, for that matter.

Please update your browser - sitting on old versions is just asking for trouble. If you really want to maintain a consistent interface then use the ESR releases which should basically just be security updates.

Unfortunately, Firefox ESR already doesn't have TabMixPlus support.

I'm on Waterfox Classic on desktop, but that's probably not gonna last forever either. And when that eventually drops support, I'll just stay on the last version until some browser vendor brings multi row tabs back. On mobile, I visit maybe five websites, and the three most common ones don't have ads, so I'm happy with my pinned old Firefox Beta version. And no matter what happens, I'm not upgrading to current Firefox on Android - well, unless the thing that happens is they take that abomination of a UI back behind the shed and put it out of its misery...

The way I look at it, it's unfortunate that the one single browser actually worth using sadly no longer gets security updates. That sucks for me, but I'm also not gonna stop using the browser.

> For Firefox users in Canada, credit card management and auto-fill are now enabled.

Apparently this has been available to users in the US since v81, and will be available to other locales in the future. Out of curiosity, how are these features gated geographically?

If anyone from the firefox mobile team is here: please fix the bug where you can't scroll through the tabs when they overflow. Also opening whatsapp links for some reason doesn't open whatsapp but chrome does. This bug and several other nuance things made me go back to chrome mobile which is unfortunate. Especially with the fact that chrome mobile doesn't support plugins.

I am a happy firefox user and the print preview is one of the very few things that made me open chrome backup.

While we'll reporting things here, please remove the `delete` to go back, it has fucked me over so many times in text fields. No other browser does it.

Backspace will no longer be used for navigation by default in Firefox 87:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041377

That key binding was added for interface compatibility with Internet Explorer, which is less important these days. If you'd like to disable it now, go to about:config and set browser.backspace_action = 2.

On Linux, browser.backspace_action = 2 was default since 2006-12-07:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action

Apparently, you can use value 1 to use backspace to scroll a page if you like!

AFAIK, delete has never worked as a substitute for going back in the history of web browsers.

How does Total Cookie Protection work with sites that redirect users to authentication providers on other domains ? What about shops that redirect to payment processors that rely on some magic cookie sharing in the background ? What about company.com loading some cookie-dependent content from company-cdn.com ?

As far as I understand, this only affects sub requests (iframes, Ajax requests, scripts, CSS, etc), and not the main request.

In a redirect, the third party site is used as a friest party request, and should not be limited by this.

See same site cookies and referrer policy to limit how much information is leaked to a third party with redirects.

> What about company.com loading some cookie-dependent content from company-cdn.com ?

I've always tried to set up delivery of all static assets w/out cookies so that I do not incur the performance overhead. Not that it makes a huge difference except on very large sites. But last time I checked, performance & speed-test tools even remove points if this isn't done. Seems this is a feature not a bug or am I missing something?

I always used Firefox because it was far ahead of other browsers in terms of UI, such as good tabbed browsing. But now it's gotten rather clunky compared to Chrome. It's been playing catch up for years. For example, Firefox really needs to implement Tab Groups like Chrome. It's such a great feature, and it's a shame that Firefox doesn't have a version of it.

>Tab Groups like Chrome

I knew it had added that feature but I didn't actually try it until just now. And oh my god you can FOLD the group... tab management just got a lot better for me!

I like tree style tabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Found a random improvement: Kraken 1.1 benchmark runs faster now.

Improved from roughly 760 to 700ms on my 5800X.

Still ways to go to reach Chrome at 560ms

Running that benchmark on my Mac (Catalina), I see a comparable difference between Firefox and Chrome but Safari (14.0.3) is ~10% faster than Chrome. This wasn't with any care taken to create a controlled environment and my Firefox had plenty of tabs open.

One more release to avif!

Would it make sense to skip AVIF and add JPEG XL instead or wait for WebP2? JPEG XL and WebP2 have better image features, such as progressive loading.

The machinery needed to add AVIF is small since browsers/sites/devices are already shipping AV1 more and more and will continue to do so regardless. Also AVIF does better at extremely low file sizes.

JPEG XL and/or WebP2 are looking to be great but there is not reason to wait for perfect to come along before adding another format to the browsers - it's not like they are running out of room for more image decoders :).

Looks like they've dropped layout.css.text-decoration-skip-ink.enabled pref in this release, garrhr... Whoever's bright idea this was - i hate you!

Firefox is my browser of choice, but it handles streaming video / video calls very poorly on MacOS. My MBP heats up and my battery goes into free fall.

When I watch Twitch or take a Zoom call in Safari the fans may come on, but it never gets anywhere near as hot. Honestly think it's dangerous to the battery life.

According to Apple's Energy Usage stat, Firefox uses "57" where Safari uses "1.7" for the same Zoom call.

Given how much is done on streaming video calls now, love it if Firefox made this a priority.

firefox 86 gets stuck on cntrl p (says preparing preview and nothing happens)

worked perfectly before, again a case of 'if it works -----'

the `print.tab_modal.enabled` preference to `false` fix described below helped

nice news alas still not yet, integration of the master password with the Gnome Keyring...

This new release also includes new ads, seems they forgot to put that in the release notes: https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433

From the tweet's Author it's disabled via:

about:config

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites

there is also:

services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored

services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites

Yes, this works. For now. The bigger problem is that this will probably go away at some point and the "sponsored" items will have no way (or a very difficult way) of being removed.

This has happened before with the browser toolbar having an about:config option to disable enlarging behavior, now you have to do some hacky CSS thing.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1274579

Now you don't just have to anticipate having options removed; that's the explicit development plan. (Quote is about a different preference, but I think it makes the style of development clear.)

> We intend to add a keyboard shortcut for this[1]. In the meantime you can revert to the old printing interface by setting the `print.tab_modal.enabled` preference to `false` via the page `about:config`. In a few releases time, after we've finished integrating user feedback and polishing rough edges, we intend to remove that preference though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275683

they plan to remove a hidden about:config preference for the system print dialog and replace it with a _dedicated keyboard shortcut_. if you think that's evidence that they want to take away your control, i beg to differ.

No, to be honest, I misread and thought that the final sentence meant that they were taking all configurability, both preference and keyboard shortcut, away.

Those preferences are also available in the Firefox UI so they are accessible to non-power users:

1. Click the "Customize your New Tab page" gear icon on the New Tab page.

2. Uncheck the "Sponsored Top Sites" and "Sponsored Stories" checkboxes.

I use Firefox ESR just so I don't have to do this every couple months.

Oh wow.

Say what you want about Safari being outdated etc. but at least they’re not going to pull shit like this.

While it's scummy, I had those on 85, so it's not this release.

Don't think the ads are in this release. They're being rolled out to a cohort of users, independent of version.

These are nearly unnoticeable because they seem to disappear as soon as you start typing.

There's a lot of reasons why Firefox is still the best browser. I never did move to Chrome all these years, and Edge is incredibly impressive on Windows.

I'll detail my opinion on the path forward for Mozilla and Firefox in particular.

Surprisingly it's been Firefox on iOS that's the biggest pull to keep me on FF overall. I think that's the real way forward for them. There's just too many Google nags to switch to Chrome on the desktop. This is limited on mobile, and putting all resources into mobile features is paramount. Then desktop version usage increases due to sync features.

I'm a Windows and iOS user, and on the desktop, zippiness is feature #1. I think they should move to Chromium, as unpopular as that is. It'll save on maintenance and an un-Googled Chromium like Edge is a very good thing. Leave FF exactly as it is, all features intact with Chromium underpinnings, borrow a few features from Vivaldi (horizontal tab support), and you easily have the best browser on the market.

On iOS, it needs support for the URL bar to move to the bottom as on Android. It needs uBlock Origin integrated by default, to borrow from iOS Edge having adblock. Improving dark mode is key. I just can't get it to work properly with DuckDuckGo's homepage. Images are sometimes reversed. I've had to turn it off to get pages to display a their native black background. I'd like to see it work out of the box with Facebook's messenger feature, it tries to redirect to the app, while in Safari this can be set to open in desktop mode and just works. Otherwise, general stability improvements and performance. It used to be very unstable, but its come a long way now. It's my favorite mobile browser.

Would those changes be enough? I'm not sure, but I do know iOS and Android browser support is the only possible way forward other than services like their VPN.

I'm the type of user though that doesn't mind the ads in the URL bar, pretty small ask on Mozilla's part. I also leave telemetry enabled because I want my usage scenario to be in Mozilla's data. As you can guess, I'm not the typical user that thinks Blink vs Gecko is somehow a mighty crusade to save the web. Even if it were where the real battle is, Mozilla is not the entity that's properly armed to take up that fight. Apple or Microsoft would be.

I have other ideas on how to move Mozilla forward and make it a very big player in the tech space. The biggest problem confronting Mozilla today is probably Mozilla. If I had to guess. Trying to convey these ideas to leadership and get a path forward set in the bureaucracy is probably pretty tough.

Firefox has hundreds of developers. I don’t understand why performance isn’t on par with Chrome. I try my best to use Firefox to bring support, but sometimes I just have to switch back when things get too laggy.

I’m sorry, but I only have 8 hours a day, and I’m not going to let my productivity flow get ruined.

Do you have numbers for this claim? Looking at https://www.anandtech.com/show/16078/the-2020-browser-battle... your statement does not match the test results. In which cases are things getting laggy for you?

What are you using that makes the performance difference be even noticeable? With the exception of cases where Firefox is absolutely broken, for me it's good enough. Or when I had crappy extensions, have you tried disabling extensions? I only have uBlock Origin and Firefox Containers these days.

It does sadden me that some sites are starting to refuse to work with Firefox these days... But I won't give up.

For me, Google Maps/Apple Maps (on DuckDuckGo) are painfully laggy on Firefox/Linux, even after force enabling all the GPU acceleration options. OpenStreetMap works fine, though.

That said, Google has a long history of making their products glitchy on Firefox, so not sure it's all Firefox's fault.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Are you using Webrender with Firefox? It’s off by default but once I turned it on, it sped up FF significantly. No beta issues so far.

I'm sorry Firefox, after using you for 3 years, I tried chrome again and for my usage, Chrome seems more reactive to my browsing, faster. I really tried but whenever I play some media, I have issues with my nvidia driver (using windows 10) or stuff like that. I will try again in the future for sure if you are still aroung !

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