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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

Are the three headline features important to you? They are:

- Picture in Picture

- Expanded Dark Mode

- DNS over HTTPs

I really like Firefox, but features like this are not going to cause people to switch browsers. I'm pretty sure most end users would never even notice them. DNS over HTTPs is actually a bit of a pain if you want to host your own DNS.

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DoH on by default is great for regular users, in order to access websites banned at the ISP DNS level. Depending on the country that can include a whole lot of websites, even not including warez and porn.

Anyway, they should really put more focus on polishing the containers extension, and make it one of the main selling points. This is the feature that has converted the most people in my experience. And since it's unique to any browser AFAIK, it has great retention power once one integrates it in their workflow.

I use Picture in Picture all the time, it's one of the main things that keeps me on Firefox. Such a great feature.

It is great, but doesn’t iOS already have this with Safari?

Edit: ah, nevermind, I thought this was specifically a Firefox IOS release today. Taking the link directly talked about iOS for me.

Yes, but that doesn’t matter if you’re not using iOS or macOS.

Is DoH really that that important right now? Your ISP can still see the domain you're connecting to via SNI. Until encrypted SNI (eSNI) arrives it doesn't seem like a big win for privacy.

But it seems like Cloudflare is working on it https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypt-that-sni-firefox-edition...

Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 currently supports ESNI, but Firefox has replaced ESNI in favor of ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) starting from version 85 due to vulnerabilities in the former. Unfortunately, no public DNS resolvers support ECH yet.

- https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/07/encrypted-clien...

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709263

Cloudflare has another blog post with the implementation details for ECH:

- https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/

Most end users would never host their own DNS. Perhaps there’s a different benefit to them from the feature?

Personally, I have never used any of these features.

I'm not even really sure what "Expanded Dark Mode" is.

DOH is probably good for many people, but I prefer to run my own DNS server (and I VPN back into my LAN when not at home with WireGuard).

Not nearly as important as some indication of whether or not the window is currently active. I have absolutely no idea why the FF devs decided that that little tidbit of information doesn't matter to anybody.

DoH is very, very important to me.

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