What's New with Firefox 142
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking which is _not_ prevented when loading the preview? If you have a phishing test url with a unique identifier, do you flunk the test even if you don't click through?
Four times of five the link previews are blocked by a cookie consent or newsletter signup modal anyway.
For normal people, i.e. those who aren't techies, you have your answer right there on why this may be useful. We are very efficient with our browser usage. Normal people struggle with this task because they get lost in the steps. Even if they can do the steps at a slow pace, it doesn't stick because it's too slow. The leap to using keyboard shortcuts just won't happen for the majority of people.
I think your points on how this is implemented are fairer. That said, that said it seems like the best approach is to follow the simplest and most efficient approach, which is to not load extensions, or use what is loaded.
The success of features like this is known with technical users like us. We don't like them because we have a workflow that avoids the issue like the phishing one you describe. It's unclear whether this helps users and is likely somewhat experimental. I think it's a much better place to be doing work that other areas where they have invested even if it has many issues.
But you're point is correct that the majority of people do indeed not use any device quickly. No matter wherever it's a phone or desktop browser.
This was the primary reason I'd never used Vivaldi browser's long-standing feature of being able to set sites within a side panel, since it ignored addons. Was only last year that was changed to allow addons.
It already seems to basically grab the text from reader mode. What might be more useful is a way to just open a link directly in that to avoid paywalls or annoying uis though
Page preview seems nice in theory, but I'm unconvinced it'll be that useful. Web pages just don't have a the level of standardization necessary to automatically grab a useful preview. And I don't think Firefox has a big enough pull to make that sort of standard.
Similar story with GitHub "hovercards". They were helpful, but someone recently decided they have to work in the Issues/PR lists too and, again, it just prevents me from reading the very thing I want to read. Had to disable them (everywhere, unfortunately).
One interesting breakdown: https://getoutofmyhead.dev/link-preview-meta-tags/
(ETA: This does seem to be what the feature actually does, having now tried it. Ignoring the AI Summary feature part of it, most of it does appear to be META tag driven and uses the card images of OpenGraph/Twitter Cards.)
This is the content for the preview:
> www.mozilla.org
> What's new with Firefox 142
> What's New | Firefox 142
> 3-4 mins reading time
No OpenGraph descriptions are good, so I can't see it ever being better than this. I don't know why this reading time metric has become a thing, it's useless because it doesn't know which parts of the page I'm interested in. I could actually see the full url from the immediate link preview, so having only the domain here is worse than useless.
The AI summary is both too short and too slow to be useful (unless maybe you're running an RTX 6000 or whatever). For this link, it only mentions Relay.
And even the basic behaviour seems broken. The preview appears at seemingly random locations on the page, sometimes under the cursor and sometimes far below. When it does decide to appear away from the cursor, releasing the mouse button actually follows the link, completely negating the purpose of the preview!
The new link preview in Firefox seems a lot less useful.
If it’s anything like Reader View in Firefox, I would expect it to ignore plugins, which is absurd in the Reader View case, and would be in the link preview case as well. So much for my browser being a user agent.
I can't think of another software program I have ever seen that makes so many non-user-initiated, i.e., automatic, HTTP requests by default; some of this behaviour cannot be disabled
Of course the default telemetry is infamous
On macOS there is a native affordance for this by using force click. It's kind of annoying that Firefox chose to not support this and instead made it click-and-hold only.
- Inigo Montoya
This is no affordance. There's nothing the design of either browser that suggests you can obtain a link preview by those actions, you just have to be told what action to take beforehand.
I agree with the other comments that say it's not discoverable. I've been using MacOS for 10 years and I didn't even know that "Force Click" is a thing. This comment caused me to look it up and then try it.
I disagree that it's "everywhere". I just tried it in Spotlight Search (Command + Space). I can never remember how to see where a thing is located there and I hoped a force click might show me. Hint: pressing command will do it but it takes 250ms to 500ms to show up and somehow I never wait that long.
Not only does Spotlight Search not show me where it is, force clicking doesn't show me a preview, or seem to do anything else.
In Finder force click edits the name of the item you're clicking. So, this doesn't seem to be terribly universal.
I suppose I'll slowly figure out how this works now that I'm aware of it.
Back when Chrome was still trying to gain traction, they came out supporting native Keychain Access for password management. Firefox, which had a 4 year head start, never implemented it.
I’ve been too busy with work to spend any time investigating the cause. At first I had been blaming the `teams-for-linux` electron app but figured that wasn’t the culprit because I close it every evening. In Firefox, `about:processes` is useful while actually using the application but I’m not really sure how best to diagnose what’s happening after the fact.
Next up would be looking closer at the pages you frequent. I think many people would be surprised at all the ways web apps screw up these days.
All that said, the browsers, as unfair as it may seem, should do better at handling all of the slop that web app and extension developers put out there. It’s sometimes just a whole lot easier to make the browser more bulletproof than it is to make a bajillion JavaScript/python monkeys conscientious and competent.
I don't go to the home page, though, only access videos via search (using !yt on Kagi) and by clicking around related videos.
I don't see any memory issues that the OP is talking about, either. Maybe uBlock is fixing it for me?
From what I understand, this is because the OS package manager changed some of Firefox's files in a background update (Ubuntu does this through unattended-upgrades), and Firefox's built-in updater doesn't have this problem.
Go into about:config and search for browser.ml stuff. Some of it is just for text completion, but you can also load models - transformer js, and also send stuff to chat gpt.
I has hundreds of tabs at that point, so I had to find out the culprit. What I did was open a task manager and expand Fifefox process to see dozens of subprocesses. I then sorted by memory (or by cpu) to find out worst offender and killed only that single subprocess without touching others. And after doing that I've looked at the list of tabs and saw that one of them has changed to the crash report tab, with a visibly different icon. And looking at it I saw that it was originally Jenkins portal. Now I proactively close it's tabs and leaks stopped. Maybe this will help you.
Is that what you're looking for? If you sort it by updated, I assume everything after the 27th is probably in the current release.
I hope there's still a way to do that feature. If nothing else, by disabling the preview which I doubt I would find as useful.
edit just retested on mobile. click and hold is basically the context menu. If you tap on the first item in the context menu (the link ended in …) you get the full link wrapped.
So, more correct to say that click and hold is the right click context menu on mobile, even though I mostly just used it for that display whole link feature. Perhaps they could put the preview as a sub item of the context menu.
Or maybe we'll just keep packing features, because everyone here knows, features are what save products! Not usability!
Hit Ctrl+f to search for a word you know for sure is on a page and Firefox might not find it. You type in the first five characters and Firefox goes "Nope, can't find it", then enter character number six, and then Firefox sees it, enter another character and nope, lost it, can't find it anymore.
You look stare right at a word and find will be unable to locate it.
But yeah, there's nothing I really care about, haven't been in a while. Funny enough, given how Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix started, I just want a slimmed down browser without a ton of features. Tabs and an extension API, that's it.
mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.
Performance took a giant hit some time in the 1.x series and never recovered, but before that, it was remarkably lightweight and snappy, so much so that normal people would notice.
Why am I reminded of the Blackadder episode, "Ink and Incapability"?
My only wish was that I can force it to always allow me to try translating things, even if it doesn't identify it as some specific language. Sometimes what I want to translate is like 30% one language and 70% another language, and I still want to translate it to another language, but since the tool doesn't see it as "foreign enough" or something, I don't even get the choice of having it translated.
Besides that, it's a wonderful despite it not being perfect. Hopefully with time it'll only get better as they get more data. On that note, I'd be more than happy to contribute data if they added some way of giving "good translation / bad translation" feedback, but haven't seen that. I guess I had two wishes in the end.
I believe you mean ex situ:
> By contrast, ex situ methods involve the removal or displacement of materials, specimens, or processes for study, preservation, or modification in a controlled setting, often at the cost of contextual integrity.
Might as well use the correct words if you want to talk above people's heads.
Second: The normal Firefox translate feature replaces the text in the page with the translated text - retaining its styling, position, context w/ images, etc. The right click menu, does not. I described the right click menu as "not in situ" which is correct.
I would challenge the "very common" claim.
But sure, the phrase is in use. Mostly not in tech, though.
And you are using it wrong.
If you wanted to express "in-place translation", you could have done so using your native tongue.
You're welcome.
You can, but it's somewhat hidden. Open the hamburger menu in the top right, then select “Translate page…”.
[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models/
Ladybird cannot come fast enough…
This built in feature requires a click and hold though.
I think it's a good news they're introducing some paid features for pro users
Not available in Italy yet.
Safari is exactly the same on iOS at least.
[0] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-link-previews...
> Just long press any link
It says right there on the page.
Not sure if this is what you're experiencing but I don't have IPV6 and this was causing a number of issues for me. Firefox has been so much better since disabling this.
I'm not saying I don't value the idea behind this, but at least with Apple they are using their primary domain as a relay meaning it's too risky to block all the legitimate addresses.
(Disclosure: I used to be on the Firefox Relay team.)
This feels much snappier - and therefore more useful.
Additional settings can be found and adjusted via about:config.
And we then ask why people aren't using Firefox...
We've been asking for a good JS and HTML engine, faster than what Firefox uses, and for better compatibility with websites (there are webs that don't work properly with Firefox). And to not put the Manifest V3 into Firefox (which it's done already, besides we still have uBlock Origin working as intended, for now, because nobody knows what's going to happen with that in the future).
And I think that's way more important that being able to group tabs.
Edit: ah, just saw the clarification. So the content is not sent anywhere to create the summary, but you do visit the original site, just like you would have if you had done a regular click.
BTW, in the spirit of being helpful: if you're using private windows just for 'fresh session' behavior, Firefox offers two other knobs for that outcome: Profiles and Containers. In Chrome I'm with you that Incognito can be a very cheap way to login to a site multiple times, but in FF you have more choices about that problem
I’m logging in and out of client accounts - often for services that don’t do delegate access - so private windows work nice for me to make sure that I’m always cleared out of what I was working on before changing to a different project. Often I copy things in private windows that aren’t secrets, it just happens to be how I used the feature.
Containers and Profile are great - but - I’m not trying to have 50+ of them at work, much easier to flip open a private window.
I acknowledge my usecase is unusual and for most I think the feature makes sense - I just want to be able to turn it off, an about:config would be fine.
Actually, sorry, it seems to be https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... and https://github.com/GodKratos/temporary-containers) based solely on the language present in the add-on and commit history
Glad to see someone forked it though, I might give that a try again.
I have a very useful plugin that automatically deletes website data (other than history and downloads) after a configured interval once you’ve closed the tab or window. You can define an exception list. I cannot recall its name, I’ll post back when I’m back at my computer.
I use both, but I try to use profiles very sparingly because you have to relaunch Firefox, which is at times unrealistic.