> We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window.
Yessss. It doesn't happen often, but the times when I open up 6-10 tabs for research but then decide they deserve their own window so I can focus on them (and subsequently drag them out one by one) is still a lot.
This is one of those Chrome features that was keeping me on Chrome. I kept switching to Firefox and this would be a major reason why I would switch back.
It's the little things (: To be honest as soon as I figure out how to change all the little workflow details I currently use in Chrome, I'll be happy to switch to use Firefox more often / primarily. I love how snappy Quantum feels.
One of the greatest multiple-tab features is available in the Multiple Tab Handler [0] in combination with Tree-Style Tabs: click-drag to close (or select). It's a bit more tedious in the current non-XUL versions of FF (have to mouse down longer), but basically if you need to close like 50 tabs in your tree, you can mouse down over one "x" and drag selecting the other "x"s and once you mouse up it closes them all. Want to close every other one or a more specific set? With the mouse down, only go over the "x"s you want to close. The same thing on the tab itself for selecting multiple tabs to do anything like reparent, reload, etc.
I would recommend Panorama Tab Groups over Panorama View fyi just because panorama view doesn't see a lot of maintenance in recent months. They're still there, but in hibernation so they don't get new features right now.
full disclosure: I'm the maintainer for Panorama Tab Groups right now so I am slightly biased. I do think photodiode and the guys in charge of Panorama View are way better than I am at this, but since they're not active right now, I've created a fork so I can have a more up to date add-on
Yess, finally, I use this feature in chromium A LOT, and it's one of the things that stopped me from switching back to firefox as my primary browser.
There's still a five year old bug where firefox thinks the window has the last size from the previous session when you restart it and save open tabs, when using a tiling window manager, but it fixes itself when you manually resize it, I can learn to live with this.
In cases like this I used to open a new window and use this plugin [0] to move them fast, because dragging tabs between windows seems very finicky to me in Firefox.
Hopefully with this update things will improve.
Moving tabs-between-windows (Tree Style Tabs, OSX) is probably my least favourite part of Firefox presently.
That and the keep-consuming-all-memory-until-all-memory-is-consumed switch, and the killing of GCLI (see: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/77a57160cf470136d1540218b70db...) which makes restarting FF far more fraught. Quite honestly, a "force quit" seems to be the most effective approach.
I used to use OneTab, but it wasn't robustly constructed to deal with data loss/recovery. I've now moved on to Session Buddy, which has some really nice features, like auto-saving your browsing sessions without your doing anything. (I guess I should check if that respects private modes.)
It's one of the features I love the most on chrome. Even better than pulling tabs into a new window is merging two windows. Without this trick you have to move tabs one by one, but with this you can merge two windows super easily.
Kind of a niche thing to comment on, but this release lands a commit I made that enables XDG desktop portals support in Firefox. If you're on KDE Plasma, you can run Firefox with the environment variable `GTK_USE_PORTAL=1` set and it will use KDE file selection dialogs.
This isn't a niche thing at all! Assuming you can get xdg-desktop-portal-kde working independently (and I expect it's possible), it's useful everywhere, not just on Plasma. The default "Open File" dialog in GTK 3 is atrocious.
I am sorry to be the one to ask, as it seems all the other commenters know it already. I even searched internet for "What are XDG desktip portals", but this came up with results for project that seem to use these portals, but no fast explanation of what they are? Can please somebody summarize what this is about?
Disclaimer: I am a Linux user since >20 years, using XMonad window manager on Ubuntu 16.04 at the moment.
It might be niche in the grand scheme of things, but for me this is an incredible improvement on my usage of Firefox. This was honestly one of the few things that Chrome did better. Firefox was the only program that I use every day that forced me to use the GTK file selection dialog. Thank you very much!
Very cool, I don't suppose this will allow one to change the dialog in hybrid/non-DM environments also? I use Openbox with a mix of KDE and GTK apps and this is one of the more common annoyances. I looked into this a while back and couldn't find any info at all.
This depends on what `xdg-desktop-portal` DBus service is running on your setup. In most non-DE environments, there is no `xdg-desktop-portal`, and as a result, GTK will automatically fall back to GTK file selectors.
If you'd like to use KDE file selectors in a non-DE setup, you'll need to get `xdg-desktop-portal-kde` working.
Right now, this is automatically enabled based on whether the application runs in a Flatpak sandbox. I spoke with GTK developers on IRC, and while they want to enable it by default, there are some unresolved issues, summarized in this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9my9fe/qt_file_pic....
Indeed, and thanks for pointing that out! I am not a fan of the simplified Gtk file dialog, even though I learned the trick of pressing Ctrl-L to edit the location. Let's see if that works with other Gtk apps. Edit: `GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 inkscape/gimp` does not work, seems it requires sandboxing? The xdg-desktop-portal-kde package says "This allows sandboxed applications to request services from outside the sandbox using KDE GUIs".
The environment variable only works with apps using GtkFileChooserNative, a GTK3-only API that landed in GTK 3.20. (In Firefox, my patch will fall back if you have an older version of GTK3.) GtkFileChooserNative was designed for use by sandboxed Flatpaks, but the environment variable can force it on outside of a sandbox.
> Easier performance management: The new Task Manager page found at about:performance lets you see how much energy each open tab consumes and provides access to close tabs to conserve power
> Improved performance for Mac and Linux users, by enabling link time optimization (Clang LTO). (Clang LTO was enabled for Windows users in Firefox 63.)
> Easier performance management: The new Task Manager page found at about:performance lets you see how much energy each open tab consumes and provides access to close tabs to conserve power
This is pretty neat, now I'm wondering why the webex extension is having "Medium" impact when it should be doing nothing.
At least it's not Google Hangouts. That crap platform will kill any laptop battery in ~30-45 min flat and make it seem like you're rendering some 8K video.
I'm sure those who build it themselves could have enabled this in earlier versions already, and I assume this means the pre-built binaries now enable this.
The binary should ship that way unless your distro decided otherwise. You can easily check by going to about:buildconfig and seeing which compiler was used.
Time for FF's balance of configurability and reasonable defaults to shine: the about:config properties to edit are `layout.css.scrollbar-color.enabled` and `layout.css.scrollbar-width.enabled`.
I imagine you could set up a scrollable div on a page, with elements within and query the position of those elements or their width. Having a custom scroll bar would flow the contained elements in different ways depending on how wide it is.
I am working on a HTML5 game which has a list of rooms, list which has a scrollbar. It looks as ugly as it can be with the default scrollbar when everything else is neatly designed and has a specific theme, it ruins the immersion and reminds you hey, this is just a browser game, not a real game. I am not saying that all the sites should have custom scrollbars, but there are definitely use cases for it.
Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern.
Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should.
> When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become familiar with elements acting in a certain way, so choosing to adopt those elements when appropriate will help with task completion, efficiency, and satisfaction.
Have you ever seen a game built entirely out of default OS windows and buttons? If you are building an accounting program, sure use all the defaults but if you are building a piece of art I think you can afford to change a scrollbar.
Just curious: does this principal apply only to scrollbars or should sites not be able to change the appearance of other controls -- like buttons, for example?
I'll reply here to both you and baroffoos, it's basically the same question.
> Does this principal apply to X for y?
In a vacuum, yes it's a principal.
In reality, while it's an antipattern it doesn't mean you should be afraid let alone disallowed the ability to exercise good judgement and make a call.
Full window, emersive games are the perfect example of UI elements like buttons that should probably be reskinned - wisely. I say wisely because you can still reskin buttons in a way that affords familiarity you can also reskin them in a way that makes them abhorrent.
A converse example is windows based skinnable hardware interface software like MSI afterburner and the like. That sort of thing is absolute unthought, untested garbage.
For website buttons I think the ship has sailed and the default elements actually look alien.
In fact a lot of CSS frameworks improve net usability from defaults anyway.
Now, is it an antipattern to use them? In essence yes, but considering everything no. Caution, many css frameworks have UX issues and you need to make a judgement in your evaluation about which features to use. I like to see how their autocomplete / dropdown features work it's usually a good litmus test because those things are basically impossible to do right.
And this why we have UX people.
It is the marriage and trade off of usability/hci and designers to create a usability experience that delights.
Though things still tend to lean toward design first approaches. Which aren't incorrect approaches but do tend to lack emphasis on circling back to fix usability later.
I think website internals are widely debatable but do have norms you must consider.
I draw the line at breaking out of the window sandbox and altering browser UI. It assumes all browsers work the same and creates a dependency on the browser for a shared experience.
An inconsequential example: setting browser ui color on mobile version of Chrome. Now your whole website design feels very native and is reasoned about with that native feel. That can them lead to inconsistent design assumptions being made on the desktop. Maybe your color selection clashes badly with the desktop grey.
Like I said, inconsequential, but might illustrate why messing with it might be a bad idea.
The other big reason I throw down at the browser window line is accessibility. Messing with things like button sizing / scrollbar sizing and things wrecks absolute havoc on these users. They also make English centric assumptions about designs that are almost always wrong eventually.
I don't think that discredits my point or it's information. If anything it points out how much of a problem this stuff is and how uninformed (or at least disconnected) developers and designers are.
One thing I like about the Firefox (Gtk?) scrollbar is that it finally removed (a few version ago already) the "Click on it somewhere, but it doesn't move there but just acts like PgDown/Up", i.e. the non-warping to the exact click position but just inching towards it. This is completely unnecessary in the time of wheels and touchpads and I already miss it everywhere else.
On Windows another lovely scrollbar "feature" is that if you move the mouse too far left while dragging the scrollbar the scrollbar will jump back to where it started.
A handful of people love it, most think it's a bug. It's particularly bad if you're using a trackpad.
I would theorize that it's not a well known complaint because most people move on quickly and just assume their computer is buggy.
But, that is what PgUp/PgDown are for on the keyboard, no? When you are navigating in these discrete steps why use the mouse, which is excellent for continuous input. If I click on something, I want to go THERE, not in the direction of it. "But we have always done it in this (imo illogical) way" is just being stubborn.
> that is what PgUp/PgDown are for on the keyboard, no?
Definitely no: If I have a hand on the mouse I surely don't want to lift it and hunt for the PgUp or PgDown just to move one page up or down. And no, I don't want to go "there" if it's actually "somewhere" in the middle of whatever, if I just want to see the previous or the next page. Going "there" is much less frequent operation than moving to the next or the previous page.
So, that means a PgDown button (I guess it is mostly that direction) on the mouse is missing. The thumb button which most mice have and are mapped to forward/backwards could be remapped to that. Or a mouse gesture? FoxyGestures, a Firefox addon, has a "Scroll Down" action.
"Most"? Where did you get that idea? "Most gaming mice" or what? Most of the users aren't gamers.
> that means a PgDown button (I guess it is mostly that direction) on the mouse is missing.
Of course is missing: "normal" (as in the most common) mice have only 2 buttons and the scroll wheel.
The scroll wheel never moves one page up (or down), but just some small number of lines, so the most common operation is then impossible for the most of the users just because a developer (who probably even "lives" in his terminal for most of the time, never lifting the both hands from the middle of the keyboard) thinks that everybody has exactly the gear that he has.
If you have a keyboard which has those and it doesn’t require moving your hand off of the mouse to hit them, it might be easier. Many smaller keyboards (e.g. most laptops or Apple’s non-pro keyboards) either omit them entirely or require a modifier key.
I have a trackpoint with no 3rd button. Many trackballs don't have scroll wheels. Many folks use arrow keys and space, shiftspace, pgup/down to navigate too and those require nice visible scroll bars that move the whole document to navigate effectively.
Long story short, stop fscking with accessibility. If your js code or libraries handles ANY input events, you'd better watch yourself because you're venturing into specialized-interface-by-and-for-assholes-land.
Things like large documents don't make that any easier though. Scrolling through a large document can take a while, but a scrollbar allows you to get to somewhere else often quite a lot faster.
Imagine you cmd + F a phrase and there are 200 responses separated into like 4 chunks of a document. It can be useful to scroll to the start of each chunk to get the context of them.
Most new mice, yes. I use an original Logitech MouseMan 3-button mouse with no scroll-wheel. I realize I'm an outlier, but no mouse has ever come close in terms of comfort for me - so I continue to use it, and life has been just fine until the advent of the Overlay Scroll Bar.
I realize the benefits of the Overlay Scroll Bar to the majority of users who have scroll-wheels. But it sure would be nice if there was an easy way to revert back to the Normal Scroll Bar ("Classic" scroll bar?). You know, the wide bar that scrolls down exactly one page-length if you click outside of the bar? I've spent plenty of time Googling and in "about:config" and exporting environment variables like GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0 to no avail.
This assumption should be listed in the Firefox "System Requirements", then. I'm pretty sure nowhere else on my system (Mac) requires the mouse to have a wheel or tracking surface, or even a second button. Just x/y positioning, and clicking.
on Windows you will always have a white scrollbar even with dark theme enabled in Windows and firefox, and if you are then on a dark website the scrollbar is basically a beacon of light
Given that WebKit recently added "Dark Mode" support, it would likely be sufficient for Firefox to do the same and simply recolour the scrollbar itself, rather than trusting CSS artists to do it sanely and properly.
You're assuming the only scrollbar is on the far right-hand side of the screen. There are plenty of inline scroll bars and scrollbars in parts of the UI that are not adjacent to "native" chrome. Always using the OS default does not make for a good experience.
I don’t see in anything I wrote any implication that I assumed anything about what scroll bars needed or would be themed.
A browser-wide scrollbar styling system, able to be opted into by use of particular CSS, doesn’t imply anything about whether we are talking about just one scroll bar or all of them.
I also disagree about native controls not always being the best solution when it comes to scrolling. We all know how annoying it is when a page jacks scrolling; it’s a usability nightmare that makes pages’ scroll behaviour harder to predict. We don’t need to add to the usability issues by letting one of the most fundamental pieces of chrome in a web browser get jacked even further than the already impermissible state.
Not really, it's the same concern; the potential for gratuitous, superfluous, or regressive modification of a stable and predictable user interface element that is representative of the most fundamental of actions when it comes to long-form document-based design: scrolling.
Every other browser allows styling scrollbars using CSS. Firefox was the only one that didn't and there's a 15 year old open bug on bugzilla about it.
The work around was to use JavaScript, just to make it work on Firefox.
It can now be implemented in CSS, which makes it really easy for you to disable or change your preference as well putting the responsibility of style on CSS and not some annoying JavaScript.
Is this the version that kills Live Bookmarks? Some of us FF old-timers are hopelessly reliant on these things, and it's, as far as I have found, the fastest way to quickly scan lists of headlines from all your favorite sites at once. Seriously, one click and you can quickly mouse over the sites on your bookmarks toolbar to consume hundreds of headlines.
Mozilla did the same with tab groups, then the addon was abandoned. The replacement that is compatible with the new form of extension isn't able to unload the tabs, just hide them, which undoes most of the performance benefits.
[abraham simpson voice] It'll happen to you too! [/abraham simpson voice] /jk
The addon was abandoned by its author because Mozilla was making major changes to the addon API at the time. Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk, not to mention it made threading/parallelizing the browser hard. The new extension API removed a lot of that freedom. After the API change, it wasn't possible (and might still not be) to develop a useful tab groups addon with the new API, so the author ceased development.
I can't imagine Mozilla crippling the addon API to the point where it can't grab data off an RSS feed and display it.
I was probably wrong about next too, then. Still, they both hail from the Steve Jobs school of blurry fonts, which is all any sane person tries to avoid in a web browser ; )
That’s like saying everyone is at risk of bear attacks because a few people in rural areas do get attacked. Yes, extensions exist but when was the last time someone clicked on a link in an email and installed an emacs extension? That happens daily to thousands of web users because the population is so many orders of magnitude greater.
> The replacement that is compatible with the new form of extension isn't able to unload the tabs, just hide them, which undoes most of the performance benefits.
Which can be worth it depending on what you trade it for. I really liked the tab group feature but the new extension API is vastly more secure and can (probably) be extended to allow for most addons.
At Mozzila they need to prioritize many different things and I can understand how a constant push to make the browser leaner is foundamental. (especially in cases like RSS feeds)
It's true that it wasn't widely used, but it seems as if Mozilla did their best to make it that way. It wasn't exposed to the user by default, but instead was hidden as something you could get to by the toolbar customization screen, so you had to modify the toolbar to even get access to the feature.
Firefox 64 introduces an entirely new API, browser.menus.overrideContext, which allows complete customization of the context menu shown within add-on content like sidebars, popups, etc.
This is illustrated right in the post by my favorite pain point, the Tree Stye Tab custom tab menu mixing with the regular tab menu.
I added Livemarks. It helps, but it's still missing a critical feature of the old extension- the icon showing which RSS links you've already visited. That'll be added at some point at least:
Still, this update felt particularly user hostile. My user experience was:
- I'm in the middle of browsing and open a tab to do a search, but the new tab shows the "Firefox needs to restart because updates are more important than you!“ page.
- I'm forced to restart. Manually, since the automatic restart is probably broken on my system. Tab state in some SPA tabs are lost.
- Now I have to migrate my live bookmarks. They converted themselves to regular bookmarks- I have to right click and delete those one by one. Then I install Livemarks, import the exported bookmarks data, and then drag those one by one to my bookmarks toolbar.
I'm half considering Chrome. If Firefox is going to be like this, why bother? Might as well start the Chrome dominance and stagnation part of the browser cycle.
arrrr... what they don't realize when they review their telemetry data is that most people that use this feature have turned off sharing telemetry data. Combine that with the fact that they haven't advertised the feature in the past decade and it leads to devs thinking nobody uses it.
Then perhaps you can see why telemetry is useful to responsible companies like Firefox, and maybe people who disable it have no right to complain about decisions based off telemetry data?
No, this is supporting direct feedback. How can mozzila know which features are useful in your opinion? how should they know that you wanted [feature X]?
Maybe they are also in the wrong if the telemetry is excessive, but the alternative is to never deprecate any feature ever.
Ask who? Power users? Then the only signal they would get is "every feature is used by everyone". That's worthless 'data'. Telemetry is the only way mozilla could possibly collect real data.
They could ask slightly more focused questions than "what would you like?".
Better than keep removing features and reasons to use Firefox from some of their loyalest users, even if they are a minority. User retention seems Mozilla's largest issue at the moment now they're down under 10%.
The usage stats from telemetry showed a 0.01% usage rate. Even if 99% of people that used the Live Bookmarks feature disabled telemetry that implies that 99% of Firefox users did not use the feature.
Well, Firefox killed the RSS button on the URL bar a while ago now (bring it back with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/), so AFAIK there has been absolutely nothing to indicate the feature even existed for years now.
Also, 0.01% of a big number is still a big number, and given the state of the feature, that number is likely to include a lot of long-time users.
According to Mozilla's statistics, 0.01% amounts to only 80'000 browser installs that use live bookmarks. That's not a big number and it's easy to find features that more people care about (ie multi-tab selection).
When resources are constrained you have to make decisions about what features you'll continue to develop and which to cut out. Live bookmarks was cut out. Mozilla devs have also mentioned that this feature is ancient code and would have required a lot of coding effort to bring up to date.
I'm sure if you were to invest the time to reimplement live bookmarks with modern code and with the internal restructuring in the browser in mind and you'd volunteer to maintain it and fix all filed bugs, they'd accept it.
Given how long ago it is since live bookmarks were a feature they made obvious, or called attention to in any way, in the default install, that's not so surprising.
They removed the visibility years ago, then progressive updates made them ever less visible, including hiding then removing RSS notification. Once the first step was taken, the route to removal was set, including the telemetry figures.
If they were as visible as pocket, perhaps as visible as pocket stories on new tabs, usage would be hugely higher.
It's really weird to apparently be personally part of a 0.01% group. I feel that usage rate must be suspect- in some Firefox version they gave out live bookmarks by default, and surely more than 1 in 10,000 people still have those. Do we know what the telemetry actually measured?
when google recently made chrome automatically sign-in once you login to a google site, i read one of their technical managers basically say, "all our data shows users care more about the convenience than the privacy" -- i thought exactly that.
I am a _huge_ RSS user (TinyTiny-RSS) but I don't think enough people used these features to continue supporting them. Plus, I really do not want my web browser to be an RSS reader. Have you considered moving to a dedicated RSS reader ?
The best thing about RSS reader in Firefox for me was the fact it blended perfectly with bookmarks feature - it was easy to reach especially when you had bookmarks bar enabled. The way it displayed content also suited me - I didn't have to break my browsing flow to open another tab like in Presto-based Opera or special feed with summaries like in Safari; links in form of bookmarks changing titles were absolutely best.
A web browser today is essentially an Internet-facing client-side operating system. You are suggesting to use something that runs outside this OS. (Just pointing out.)
You have no idea how excited I am for this. I use sway as my daily driver since it supports HiDPI so much better than i3, but the one caveat to that has been firefox and xwayland. Once this ships, sway will have nearly flawless HiDPI support.
"GNOME and KDE have dbus APIs for some (but not all) of these things, and sway has
its own IPC, and other compositors probably have similar solutions. However, they
all use different mechanisms, which means that if you are writing say, screenshot
application you either have to write a different backend for every compositor, or
choose just one or two to support.
"Something all of these types of applications have in common is they need to be able to inspect and/or modify state from other applications or the compositor itself. Which wayland's security model normally prevents. I think a major gap in wayland, is having a way for an application to run with escalated permissions so it can have access to other applications. Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas on what that would look like."
and then, later in the thread:
"for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region."
The entire thread linked to above is worth reading.
My own takeaway is that Wayland is just way too immature to compete with X for my power-user use cases.
Window managers can implement their own extra protocols of course, but instead of X11 where everything was standardized and window managers didn't even have to think about it, there is no standard and window managers have to rewrite all the code for it themselves.
As another example, Linux doesn't have just one desktop environment, like Windows or MacOS, would you say that's an "issue", even if it's a deliberate decision?
Luckily, Firefox supporting Wayland doesn't hurt you at all. I'm also very excited about Firefox supporting Wayland. It isn't dropping support for X11.
xclip works fine for me on wayland (Arch), the rest... yeah, colorpicker? doesn't work. Screenshot? Gnome tool works but grabbing an area has a weird tainted color.
In my experience X11 has zero shortcomings compared to Wayland. The code might be ancient and arcane at some points but the performance and features (hello "ssh -X") are actually far superior.
I have never been able to get a tearing-free experience with X11, and I've tried everything to fix it. Meanwhile Wayland is butter smooth out of the box on the same hardware. Security is another obvious advantage of Wayland.
Just another data point: I've never experienced screen tearing in the decades that I've used X.
Also, when I run X just for myself on my own laptop, what security issues do I have to worry about with X that I don't have to worry about with Wayland?
That's interesting, because I've had tearing issues with all major GPU brands (Intel, AMD and Nvidia), in particular when multiple monitors are involved. What's your setup like?
With regards to security, the main issue is that X11 provides no isolation between applications, allowing them to listen to keystrokes and the clipboard at all times. With Wayland, only focused applications have this access.
Currently I'm using an old, slow laptop, with a graphics card integrated in to the motherboard. Nothing special. But I don't do any demanding graphics processing on it. I just watch movies and use web browsers and a terminal. I don't play graphically intense games on it.
"With regards to security, the main issue is that X11 provides no isolation between applications, allowing them to listen to keystrokes and the"
I don't see why this should concern me or 90% of X users, because if any malware manages to run on our systems it'll already have full control over them without needing to resort to any kind of keystroke sniffing in X.
I'm struggling to think of a scenario where malware's running on the same machine with access to a single X session, which doesn't already have full control over the account whose keystrokes they'd be presumably sniffing. They could just substitute their own malware versions of web browsers, shells, editors, or whatever other software the user uses and sniff keystrokes in there, without needing to touch X.
Not that it hurts to have more isolation than you get in X, but I'd need a lot more convincing for me to give up the convenience I already enjoy with X.
Can someone paint me a realistic, relatively common threat scenario where not having Wayland's isolation would actually present a serious security risk?
Right, if you already have malware running on your system, all bets are off. However, I'm sure you're aware that large applications like Chromium have tons of vulnerabilities, which is why they come with a sandbox to protect against exploitation. X11 is one of the biggest holes in these sandbox solutions. Replacing X11 with Wayland would plug this hole. I'd argue that security is something the average user cares about.
If your web browser is compromised, that's malware running on your system right there.
A compromised web browser doesn't need X to control the rest of your system. It can usually already write all over your system and perform all sorts of other attacks, including substituting applications, paths, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.. not to mention try kernel exploits and the like -- not that they'd need to on a single-user system, as they could just get your sudo password by one of the other means mentioned above, all without touching X.
Anyway, if a typical user's browser is compromised, they're already completely screwed, as they typically access their online banking and webmail through it. Once again, the attacker does not need to touch X to get access to any of that.
To me it still sounds like Wayland's security model is trying to solve a niche problem that most X users don't really suffer from -- and charging an arm and a leg for it.
> It can usually already write all over your system and perform all sorts of other attacks
Not necessarily. Properly sandboxed applications like Chromium have a seccomp filter, separate pid/user/etc namespaces and bind mounts setup to isolate themselves from the rest of the system as much as possible.
> Anyway, if a typical user's browser is compromised, they're already completely screwed
It really depends on which part of the browser is compromised. Again, Chromium has some pretty good isolation. Having one malicious website exploit a vulnerability does not necessarily mean the attacker gets access to any of the other browser data.
If the browser as a whole has not been compromised, then internally it should be able to deal with the clipboard the same what that Wayland deals with it.
For instance, only the currently focused tab should have access to the X clipboard.
Superior performance? Like when windows take a whole second to appear because the protocol is synchronous and the server is busy doing something else? :)
Wayland makes lots of things possible: multi-monitor HiDPI, touchpad gestures like pinch to zoom (just like Macs could do ages ago), touchscreen support that's actually independent of the mouse pointer instead of always dragging it along… and there's finally no goddamn screen tearing. Every frame is perfect™.
> Superior performance? Like when windows take a whole second to appear because the protocol is synchronous and the server is busy doing something else?
Might be true, never happened to me. But what about FPS in Games. X11 beats it there for me. Or what about in the most important metric of them all: Latency. In all my Tests Latncy on Wayland is always a regression, compared to X11. (I use Intel and HDxxxx era AMD Graphics, can not say anything about Nvidia)
> Wayland makes lots of things possible
That might be true. But X11 can be extended and has been extended very often (hence the messy code). One thing I need regularly, namely OpenGL pass-through via SSH, will never be possible with Wayland.
> Every frame is perfect™
To me far less important than latency. Wayland should only care about tearing when I play full screen games. When I type on the terminal I want my characters appear instantly, then I don't care about tearing at all.
On my own testing (GNOME, latest Kernel, as well as Sway temporarily) latency and FPS were better on Wayland than X11 (though only on my beefier graphics card, windows rendered on the second one had higher latency and comparatively lower FPS than expected. But I don't game on that card.
>One thing I need regularly, namely OpenGL pass-through via SSH, will never be possible with Wayland.
Correct because Wayland isn't a network-like protocol as X is (though I've had X network passthrough break or fill up a gigabit ethernet connection worth of bandwidth on more than one occasion).
If you want remote desktop on Wayland, you need a tool specifically designed for that.
It's the unix mindset after all; why have one tool (X) do everything when you can have lots of tools interact and each solves it's own little problems (Wayland + tools)?
>Wayland should only care about tearing when I play full screen games.
If you run a game on wayland you usually get control over the screen anyway when you go fullscreen, once you have exclusive control you can go tearing all you want.
Though with adaptive sync becoming more common (and already being common on laptops) the perfect frame is less costly than tearing; the display will run at the FPS you can manage (within bounds). For it to work you only need to VSync and the GPU driver handles the rest.
In my experience, Wayland has way better and smoother performance than X on adaptive sync displays.
X11 doesn't easily support multiple monitors at different DPI, which is almost essential when using a hiRes laptop with an external (also hiRes) monitor.
Yea, I too love Sway and use it as my daily driver. I recommend you use the non-packaged version 65 or newer of Firefox, just need the GDK_BACKEND=wayland environment variable set. Only issue is due to the current state of Sway there are some drag-and-drop issues, but that's not a Firefox thing.
For those using Firefox, I have one question. Is there any way to replicate Chrome's tab-to-search feature? It's literally the ONLY reason I'm still on Chrome.
Let me explain by showing how I would search for "apples" in youtube across both browsers.
Firefox:
1 - Ctrl+L (go to location bar)
2 - Type "you", press "down" to select youtube from history.
3 - Wait for site to load......
4 - Click on search box
5 - Type in "apples"
6 - Press enter
Chrome:
1 - Ctrl+L (go to location bar)
2 - Type "you", and if youtube is first item in history,
3 - Press "tab"
4 - Type in "apples"
5 - Press enter.
Youtube opens up with my searched item. Nice and easy with far fewer key presses no waiting nor mouse clicking.
Works for youtube, hacker news, wiktionary, google images, and a heap of other sites I use daily.
now you can type in the omnibar "yt my search" and it will do directly the search.
It's not as good as chrome solution but it's the only thing for now.
I remember first using this feature in IE6 back when that browser was new, and I've used it since then. I have "i" for IMDb search, "w" for WikiPedia. "g" goes to DuckDuckGo now after Google became malicious and evil, because of years of muscle memory.
3. Now in the Location bar type "you apples" and apples will be searched on YouTube.
I use this for a lot of sites with search inputs. I often do searches using ddg of sites I visit with forums or other buried content. Any search that has a URL that you can input a set of terms into can be used. Just use %s in the location for where the terms are in the URL.
I think in Firefox the closest is to manually add them as search providers with a short code :/ Right-click in e.g. the search field on YouTube, there's an option to add it with a key word, e.g. "yt". You then can do "yt apples" in the address bar.
Maybe there's an extension that does the Chrome thing, but I searched in the past and didn't find one.
Firefox have a search bar for this purpose. Isn't Chrome sending everything you type in the omnibar, including urls and search queries, to Google?
To search for "apples" on Youtube, press Ctrl-E to focus on the search bar, type "apples", click on the Youtube icon or press Ctrl-down/up arrow to choose Youtube, then enter.
Firefox uses it to populate the search bar drop down menu with the available search engines for a site, but it does not add them automatically like Chrome does.
It should be possible to build this with an extension, but I haven't tried.
That being said, there are a few alternatives. Firefox Top Sites supports search engines, as described in https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/save-a-search-step/. Additionally, if you use DuckDuckGo as your default, you can use bang patterns, which I prefer as they are curated.
See, this means that I need to do this for every site I want to search in advance. With Chrome I literally just have to visit the site. No creating bookmarks, nothing.
Curious about the "energy impact" metric. It seems to be just runtime. Fairly lame, had expected some kind of real energy model. This will be quite misleading in many cases, e.g. GPU usage or heavy floating point.
// 'Dispatches' doesn't make sense to users, and it's difficult to present
// two numbers in a meaningful way, so we need to somehow aggregate the
// dispatches and duration values we have.
// The current formula to aggregate the numbers assumes that the cost of
// a dispatch is equivalent to 1ms of CPU time.
// Dividing the result by the sampling interval and by 10 gives a number that
// looks like a familiar percentage to users, as fullying using one core will
// result in a number close to 100.
let energyImpact =
Math.max(duration || 0, dispatches * 1000) / UPDATE_INTERVAL_MS / 10;
// Keep only 2 digits after the decimal point.
There's always been a look & feel problem for me with Firefox...something that seemed to be solved right out of the box with Chrome. I've not been able to put my finger on it, but I think this kind of small user-convenience stuff is part of it. It's not "features" per se, but more the feel of how the application works.
It reminds me of old platform video games before Super Mario Bros. (and for a while after) Superficially, they looked and played kind of the same, but there were a thousand little tweaks in how Mario handled that made it feel right.
I'm definitely going to give Firefox a spin and see how it handles these days.
Same here. I gave Firefox a fresh chance at v57 (Quantam), but I'm back to Chrome. It was fine honestly, no problems with performance or with what I could do. But Right after install, I spent several minutes in just fixing some very basic UI irritations. It had some extra-spacing on sides of the address bar, a 'heavy' looking menu bar, etc. (most users don't want to do that, and rightly so).
I don't mind the different styled settings or menu items at all. The balance (or lack thereof) between font-sizes/font-weights, line weights, the darker gray lines etc. is what perturbs me. Maybe they should look at making the UI look a little 'lighter', like Safari and Chrome.
Firefox is my main browser and I love it, but I totally see what you mean.
Chrome looks just right out of the box, but even a small line in Firefox UI makes it irritating.
I have several userChrome CSS changes to make it look exactly as I want. All these taming took me some time, but it's totally worth it because this is a software you spend a few hours every day on.
It reads to me as though you easily get used to Firefox. I can see some advantages related to privacy. Why not give it a shot and use it for two weeks?
I'm amused that you say that specifically about dragging tabs around, because it's magnificently buggy on chrome. Windows popping up and down because they're technically under the drag despite multiple windows in between, big flashes of white, positions where it flickers constantly between states, issues where I hit the limit of the drag and have to do a second drag to get the tab completely in place...
Some of the dialogs seem clumsy, like when you want to clear cookies (level 1 dialog) and then a modal "are you sure" pops over the first dialog (now 2 levels of dialogs).
Other places that could use some revamp are manage bookmarks dialog.
decent bookmark management is all thats keeping it from being my daily driver. id love to support moz but cant coming from opera which has fantastic bookmarking and speed dials
I have a local html page devoted to news. An entry for a specific site will see at least two urls: The main site's URL and a link to it's RSS feed.
Linking to the feed directly was a great way to bypass all the modern garbage on the home page to see a simple list of articles (not unlike HN's home page). It's borked now...
None of my RSS links render. Chromium was very bad at this but at least it rendered a few (a couple of examples below), FF64 doesn't render any (in any form):
A huge part of my ability to enjoy the web has just been destroyed.:( I'll have to test this on other browsers...
edit (update): both sample links above are working now (odd). Most others with XML, RSS, Atom extensions do not render (FF offers to open in external app or save).
Why not use a feed reader which is designed and optimized for that task? I like Newsblur.com (aka https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur) but there are tons of great desktop apps which do a much better job than Firefox ever did.
Another vote for newsblur. I plan to self-host, but until I do, Sam hosts it for me. (... and I'll keep playing for premium even when I do self host, because shiloh needs to eat too :)
I know it is not what you've been doing but it may be something you'd like to consider. I also love RSS and even though there are many add-ons to use in Firefox to restore that kind of functionality, I prefer to use Thunderbird to consume RSS/Atom feeds, I've posted about it at:
I actually use The Old Reader[0] for most tech sites (including hnFrontPage and showHN). There are other sites that I'm only partially interested in or they have so much content, I don't want them in my Reader.
When I have time, I'll access the Feed Link and give the stories a bird's eye view. Also, some of these home pages are a nightmare in the Times Square sense of the word.
The Old Reader also keeps the the Feed Link accessible. Sometimes I'll hit the [mark all as read] but later on, I might go back and look at the day's listings for a particular site. I'm surprised how often I do this for some sites (mostly to reread an article or follow up on a comment I made). That flexibility is lost now.
Also, I don't subscribe to general news sites. The amount of articles would be overwhelming. News sites with RSS Feed Links make them manageable. I've essentially lost this - so I'll either have to access their obnoxious home pages (with anti-trackers fully loaded) or find other means.
I used to go local on my feeds... and while I avoid the cloud for most things, feed listings feel very natural there (also they don't take up local storage).
It's workable but I'm a bit annoyed that an application built on rendering (simple) tags (rq'd little/zero work to maintain) decides that things associated with RSS are going to be killed off (maybe??... in favor of their own news sources - which require much more work to maintain).
I believe that the FF RSS reader is still available via extension. I am not 100% certain but I seem to recall hearing that in a podcast which covered the pending demise of standard RSS support in FF.
I really wish they would implement tab stacking, that is the feature that I really miss from the old Opera, here is a video of how it looks in case you don't know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpJvg8icmM
I've tried to find an extension for FF that does this, but so far I was unable to find one.
Have you tried out TreeStyle Tabs? It has all of the stacking features I saw in that video, but doesn't have the preview features (maybe you can use it alongside another extension that provides that).
I was about to suggest this too. It's like a more general version of stacking, since you have multiple levels, and much more automatic (but you can drag the tabs into a different tree structure if you want).
I think it would solve the GP comment's problem better too. There's not so much need to use multiple windows if you can just use multiple trees in the same window.
As a bonus there are many plugins for the plugin (!) such as one that lets you use the mouse wheel on it to switch tabs. [1] This is more useful in the tab tree than the normal tab strip, especially since it skips over tabs hidden in collapsed subtrees.
All that stuff about browser engine competition is great but TST is the real reason to use Firefox rather than Chrome.
> I think it would solve the GP comment's problem better too. There's not so much need to use multiple windows if you can just use multiple trees in the same window.
Even if you do want a new window - drag the common parent tab to a new window and it takes its children along for the ride.
I've been using TreeStyle tabs for a few months now.
While I love the tool, it definitely has some rough edges with integration.
It has the same problem Firefox Multi-Account Containers has: Trying to change internal UI for an internal feature by using an addon simply isn't practical (yet).
It was practical before they killed XUL extensions and went with a crippled Chrome clone that can't hide it's horizontal tab bar. It's time for Mozilla to embrace and extend that garbage.
The big issue here is that Chrome's extension API (which Firefox adopted) doesn't allow this directly, so any extensions trying this need to:
1. rebuild the UI from scratch
2. rebuild basic tab handling behaviour from scratch
3. build tab stacking on top of that
4. (ideally) hide Firefox's existing tab bar
And there's two issues with the above steps:
(a) 4 hasn't been possible with the new extensions API sofar (it was in progress last I checked, maybe it's possible now)
(b) the dev effort required is big, so results have not been very polished sofar
they're getting there though
On the other hand, if you want to try something resembling that as-yet-unsurpassed 2010 UI today, Vivaldi is working on replicating it natively.
I'm never keen to recommend Vivaldi because it's (a) closed source, which is why we don't have Opera anymore and (b) it's Blink, and we need diversity there. But it's a very good browser otherwise.
I'm not clear on why you would want TST as an extension rather than built into the browser chrome. It'd be like wanting the tab bar, or the address bar, to be an extension. Those things belong in the browser chrome; they're what the browser chrome "layer" is for. Just dig into the Firefox code and add TST to the browser itself. (It wouldn't be all that much work; it'd just be 1. adding "parent" and "children" properties to tab model-objects; and 2. adding a TST sidebar view-controller, fed from the same data-binding that backs the regular tab bar.)
It's pretty clear that people desire it as an extension because a good and functional extension exists whereas first party support in a browser does not. There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points.
An extension exists NOW that people enjoy using. Building THIS into firefox isn't a replacement for a robust extension interface unless you suppose that first party developers can think or implement all the good ideas that will ever come about.
People in truth give zero damns if its easier to implement or more elegantly done any more than they care if their tv is beautifully engineered because their priorities aren't yours. They care about functionality. Right now firefox seems to be lighter and even post quantum have better extensions. Throwing either of those out will cause it to cede more marketshare to chrome.
> unless you suppose that first party developers can think or implement all the good ideas that will ever come about.
Er, no. What I think is that becoming a "first-party developer"—when you already know as much about the internals of Firefox as is required to maintain an extension such as TST—isn't that hard. Firefox is a FOSS project, with internals that are well-maintained and well-documented, and the UI layer is abstracted out to make working with it easier for frontend engineers (which is why, unlike any other browser, you constantly see versions of Firefox with new "experimental UIs.")
> There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points.
I mean, that was my argument, yes. And I don't see how it misses the point, because I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a Firefox user, nor am I coming at this from the perspective of one of the existing TST maintainers. I have no dog in the fight of Firefox's extension system, because—at the earliest point I'd even start using Firefox—it'd already be a “fact of life” that it only has WebExtensions. I'd just have to take it as a given that you can't do what TST does (did) as an extension, and ask the question afresh: how do you implement something like TST?
And the answer is: natively, in the browser chrome, and thankfully so, because that's what TST should have done in the first place and it'll make many parts of the implementation a lot easier. (See my sibling reply.)
Though, also, never mind Firefox. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a developer who would want to implement TST-like functionality for any FOSS browser. For example, TST-like functionality for Chromium.
The fact that TST already exists for "old Firefox" doesn't really matter. That's a different web-browser than the one we've got now, and no current browser lets you do what TST did at the extension level. I don't care about ideological arguments about whether they should let you; I care about the practical facts of how to go about having TST functionality in the present/future of the browser landscape.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, I completely agree. This is absolutely something that I think should be in core.
There are some features that are rightly being removed from core in favour of being served by an extension (Container Tabs is a great example—one of my favourite and most-used features personally, but I prefer it in an extension for a few reasons). Better tab management is the opposite: this is something Firefox should work on getting right out of the box.
I get that unless/until it makes it into core, we need good, working, popular extensions to bridge the gap, and perhaps to convince core devs there's an audience, but that's no reason to stop asking for it.
Would also recommend people trial Vivaldi, or even Opera 12 (probably still downloadable from somewhere out there) to try out the general UI concept.
Given that Tree Style Tab has 7,500+ commits, 10 pull requests (200 closed), almost 400 issues (almost 1,500 closed), and the download is 5.6 megs (2.7 megs zipped), there may be more to it than your two-step solution.
Not necessarily. Sometimes 99% of the work of something is the patches you must make for a constantly-leaking abstraction that you introduced by solving the problem on the wrong layer.
For an example I've experienced personally: LinkedIn provides a data API... for a price. There are entire companies, however, that scrape LinkedIn's data instead of paying that price, and then try to work with the scraped data (which has been "baked down" through all sorts of views, localization, projections, etc.) as if it was the API data.
How much more code do you think such a scraper consists of, compared to an API client?
(The LinkedIn case is even worse because LinkedIn has stateful firewalls that actively thwart scraping, and these scrapers have to have code to trick the firewall, as well.)
Prior to quantum you could do so. You have always been able to do so with css in your user profile. You don't have to actually know css you just have to google and paste the text into a file.
For 4, you’re able to hide the Firefox tab bar with some css in userChrome.css now. I’m using tree style tabs and have hidden the default tabs as my daily driver.
What's the status of the cat and mouse game being played with autoplay video being forced on and new options needing to be hunted down?
First Chrome forced it on, because EvilCorp's business model is around a forced-open-eyelid philosophy of advertising revenue from unstoppable impressions.
Next I moved to Firefox, which in an update a few months ago changed the autoplay option to be on, removed the config attribute and made it a new one, which has as options 0, 1 and 2. Turned out autoplay default should be 1.
I'm not about to wait to find out what's around the corner. I started using Vivaldi this weekend in hopes someone actually made a browser for those who don't care about some company's ad revenue.
I don't know why Firefox would do that, and introduce Pocket as well. Is copying Google that sexy a thing?
I introduced the change to 0,1,2. Not sure what happened when we first introduced autoplay but the change to 0,1,2 was so we could let users switch between enabled, disabled and ask the user.
Original plan was to ask the user by default. We did some user testing with this change and it looks like we will be changing it to block by default based on feedback
Not sure what this has to do with any companies ad revenue, or pocket
Block by default, and not ask by default? That seems unfortunate to me, and will definitely break one of my services for Firefox users. I have a site which coordinates watching videos amongst a party of people. To the browser heuristics it looks like "autoplay" (the host starts the video manually, and some scripting on the page kicks it off for everyone else and works w/ the backend to maintain something resembling stream sync.) This is a consensual thing, you click the host's invite only link, you're taken to a landing page that tells you who made the link and briefly describes the service. Presumably you would not have clicked through all that if you didn't want to watch a video w/ the host.
I already had to deal w/ increased complaints from users due to scripts no longer being able to start the video in Chrome when the user hasn't interacted with the DOM yet. The only warning was an error in the development console. Users would get incredibly confused because they'd join the room and "lurk", i.e not interact w/ chat or the site, and then they'd be left wondering why everyone is commenting on the video when their's hasn't started playing.
I realize autoplay gets a lot of flak due to large corporations using it to further their aggressive marketing campaigns, but there are legitimate use cases out there which you will be breaking w/ a block-by-default policy. I'd urge you to reconsider ask-by-default, or at least allow scripts to have some sort of API whereby they can ask the user for permission ahead of time.
This just really sucks, because it's hard to communicate these sorts of things to my userbase which has wildly varying degrees of technical competency. It's also unfortunate to, essentially, need relay the message "some organizations (ab|mis)used this useragent functionality, so now nobody gets to use it."
It sucks when you want to use feature that arent available however users wishes always trump site authors, we tested ask by default and it turned out more users wanted them blocked
"Click here to play video" is also clear and easy to understand, not sure why you would think your users could not handle that.
>We tested ask by default and it turned out more users wanted them blocked.
I was one of those users, as I have Nightly installed. I hope you don't seriously think me clicking "no" on the majority of those popups in any way equates to me saying "videos should never autoplay." -- Hell I used my own service and approved one of those dialogs for it.
You should be careful how you read into statistics: there is a huge difference between "90+% of users said no to the autoplay prompt" and "90+% of users think autoplay should be off by default."
>Not sure why you would think your users could not handle that.
I don't think, I know, because I've fielded the numerous reports from users who thought my service was broken when Google[1] decided their "media engagement index" was too low and the videos weren't starting automatically for them.
It is objectively a bad experience for my users if they all have to manually click play and their streams are randomly offset from the host and they see people "spoiling" things in chat. The reality is that many of my users would sit on the page, looking at a play button (that wasn't there before), wondering why people are already talking about the video in chat. "Has it started yet?" "When does it start?" "I think I'm buffering", etc.
You're a benevolent site amidst a maelstrom of websites who eagerly want users to hear and see things that they didn't expect. And very large publishers are perhaps the most guilty. News websites, Facebook ads, and typical websites with some announcer voice yapping away with music in the back, trying to get your attention to Buy something.
So why stop at a pop-up for AutoPlay video?
"The website has requested permission to have autoplay video. Grant (Y/N)"
but also
" " " " .. requested permission to display notifications.."
Why stop there?
" .. requested permission to autoplay media with sound .."
and why not
" .. requested permission to set/store cookies "
Finally, after a drum roll:
"Sign up to this mailing list!" - unblockable JavaScript popup when you're a third down the article.
How many bloody popups would satisfy every single website publisher? Turn all the damn things off, let the designers figure out if they want to point a big giant arrow GIF to where the "Click Here" button to play the video is.
While I can understand the distaste for "dialog overload" the alternative being proposed here is that my service is broken for my users, or they go into `about:config`. My average user doesn't know, or care, what `about:config` is, so that's a non-starter. (Many of them are lost just going through the usual Preferences.) -- Plus I wouldn't want them to enable autoplay globally just to use my service.
At least with the webcam/microphone/notification APIs the average user has a chance at understanding what's going on, they are not being given the same choice here, and that's what I take issue with. Believe me I get it: every week there's some site that makes me go "what on earth do they need push notifications for?" -- I'm still happy to make that choice, though.
If this is about giving the user's more control over what they see: then the setting should not be hidden in about:config, full stop. I know this may be lost on the HN crowd, but doing that relegates the functionality to a small fraction of power-users.
If this is about giving the user's more control over what they see: then the setting should not be hidden in about:config, full stop. I know this may be lost on the HN crowd, but doing that relegates the functionality to a small fraction of power-users.
You know what, I think we agree! That's two votes for "move some stuff out of top-secret about:config and into Settings where the mortals can actually use it, it's useful for them."
>Block by default, and not ask by default? That seems unfortunate to me, and will definitely break one of my services for Firefox users.
Hold on -- do you want a popup every time you visit a new page? It's a nightmare. And break what for whom? You want something to play, you click the Play icon on the video. It doesn't BLOCK video by default, it blocks the autoplaying of the same.
Also - and perhaps this was some bug or some setting I had - but when I updated to 'that' Firefox some months back, I'm pretty sure I had autoplay playING things. I had previously used about:config to have autoplay off, and then they changed it (as per the 0 1 2 and property name change). Possibly I hit enter too fast, possibly I didn't notice and just got annoyed at the popups asking me, whatever it was, I wanted it just "off" and I had to Google around until I found comment in some forum someplace which has this option. The point is, instead of being an "about:config" option, it should be an obvious setting in the Menu -> Options section.
I'm amazed that someone thinks not forcing things is somehow "breaking" things. If it's the type of breaking you mean (breaking ad-tech), then yes, let's continue the smashathon. Autoplay video, whether on a news site or some yapping garbage on the side as an ad, is a terrible trend for us who don't like such distractions.
>You want something to play when you click the play icon on the video.
My users explicitly do not want that, it's why I built my service, to answer a need which was not met: the lack of a virtual space to have a shared theater-like experience. They want the video to play when it starts for everyone else in the room, and they were extremely confused a few months ago when Google broke the same thing.
"I realize autoplay gets a lot of flak due to large corporations using it to further their aggressive marketing campaigns"
Not just because of that, although that is the most egregious example. Personally, I find any autoplay at all to be objectionable. It doesn't matter if it's an ad, a YouTube video, or anything else.
I respect your opinion but sadly my service just does not work any other way. You don't go to a theater and choose when the projectionist starts the film, or when the actors start playing, or when the musicians start their concert: the venue / director / manager determine that ahead of time. You don't go to a party and choose what music the host plays, though obviously one hopes the host would value your input should you choose to speak for or against a particular set list. -- That is what my service sets out to create: a shared virtual environment where people can experience media, together, in realtime, as opposed to it being a solitary experience.
If useragents remove my ability to start playing content on behalf of my users (who have already agreed to that by clicking past the event banner) then my service will have to move to a non-web platform. Though we have a difference of opinion hopefully you can see why I find that prospect to be distressing: I love the web, and I hate to see it effectively sunsetting my application.
I'm confused about what this means when for example I want the video to play via javascript external to the embedded player.
For example, when user clicks text link on page that opens a lightbox (such as fancybox) containing an embedded video. I (and the user) would want the video to begin playing immediately upon opening the lightbox. But it sounds ilke the user will now need to additionally press play on the embedded video? Anyone know?
I really hope this is not the case. I'm hoping the clicking of the initial text link that opens lightbox is enough to authorize video playback with sound on all devices.
I hope there's a bigger backlash to Google blacklisting/whitelisting certain features on websites they deem worthy/unworthy.
It's one thing to discriminate against certain sites in Search, where Google owns the webpages and servers. But to discriminate against the open web so that their services have an advantage over startups and smaller publishers is beyond unethical. At this point they're starting to act like a monopolistic ISP and should be called out for it.
Autoplay is the last straw, I'm at the verge of migrating to Firefox for my primary browser because it seems Chromium just can't keep those damn videos from playing and more often than not the videos seem to steal keyboard too. When space, shift-space, arrow up and down stop working because of a <video> element that's a good point to decide the browser is broken.
> Next I moved to Firefox, which in an update a few months ago changed the autoplay option to be on, removed the config attribute and made it a new one, which has as options 0, 1 and 2. Turned out autoplay default should be 1.
I don't understand what you mean here. Without having changed any of the settings from the default, Firefox (Nightly) pops up to ask me if I want to "allow auto-playing media with sound" the first time each website tries to do it. If I say no, the media doesn't auto-play.
It's an option under "Websites" in "Preferences"; the options are "Never Auto-Play," "Always Auto-Play," and "Stop Media with Sound." The latter is the default. You can set a default for all web sites, and add override settings for specific sites.
(There's actually a wealth of stuff in this preference tab: you can set defaults and per-site overrides for content blockers, page zoom levels, camera and microphone, defaulting to "Reader View" for particularly annoying sites, and so on.)
Safari actually maintains a list of websites where they allow auto-play by default at ~/Library/Safari/SitesAllowedToAutoplay.plist. Most of them are video sites, such as YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, Nicovideo, etc. but they also have some non-video sites that heavily uses video, such as Amazon.
It's a binary plist, but you can view the content using:
Not sure how you can disagree with a question, but I looked it up:
>"Back in 2014, the last year of the Google deal, that agreement brought in $323 million of the foundation’s $330 million in total revenue."
They had deal with Yahoo for similar money, and walked from that to go to Google again.
For financials I can find they got all but 2% of their money from Google.
Presumably for this money Google gets to call some shots like no default blocking off their ads, and, I'd imagine autoplay as default if that's important to Google.
I'd expect a supposedly open foundation like Mozilla to publish details of major decisions. You're not open without transparency.
Every new release of Firefox makes the experience better and better. I'm glad Mozilla has started focusing on the browser again, not just as an "open alternative to chrome" but as the "best possible browser", which I truly believe Firefox today is :)
Is Mikeal Rogers with the chrome folks? Or are they with Mozilla? Because it's really not clear[0][1], and clarifying it seems necessary to legitimizing your post.
I "wanted" Mozilla to win, in the last two years we've had the Cliqz and Looking Glass controversies, and a number of security reports based on decade-old bugs.
Firefox is a great browser, but Looking Glass was enough for me to switch back to Chrome. I want Mozilla to do well, but like the author has said, their marketing team seems to have strange ideas of how to win, and it goes completely against the perception of what Mozilla is for.
So you switched to Chrome?! Where the analytics stuff is not just a single fuck-up (followed by an apology) but built-in? Where all of a sudden "delete cookies" means "delete cookies except for those by Google"?
I don't get it. Criticizing Mozilla for those things is fair, but switching to Chrome as a reaction to them doesn't make sense to me.
At least with Chrome you have a rough idea of who will be using your data - Google. I use Gmail at work, and I have an Android phone, so I'd be fooling myself if I were to say that Google weren't tracking me already.
With Firefox, it's a breach of trust. The analytics stuff was a major fuck-up, and I would've accepted that apology if they didn't then align themselves with a TV company to run a promotion in my browser.
I could understand all of it if the code base was amazing, but when your flagship product receives exploits from bugs raised over a decade ago, before Chrome even existed, it's hard to trust Mozilla to be able to compete with Google.
I want to believe firefox is the best but Chrome's user interface is simply too smooth and clean and firefox has not been able to match that.
There are some details that you will only notice if you have used FF and chrome in equal amounts for a long time, such as being able to easily merge two windows in Chrome (in one click vs two), or clumsy bookmarks and search history settings in FF, etc.
Also there's a significantly slower drop-down url menu in firefox?? How does no one notice this? I click on a result and a list of other results take its place and send me to the wrong page, before the change even appears in the url box.
There will be people who ask me to elaborate on my points here, but I'm so tired of doing that for Firefox supporters and curious chrome users. If you want to feel why Chrome is simply better, just use it and compare it to Firefox.
As long as both browsers are able to do everything, a good UI is the only deciding factor for me. So many people in this thread are echoing what I've said.
Firefox has tags for bookmarks, whereas Chrome doesn't. This can help in refining your searches.
Firefox's Awesome Bar (location bar) is superior to Chrome's Omnibar. And this matters too when it comes to bookmarks, which are automatically searched. But when typing in your location bar, you can also limit the searches just to your bookmarks by starting the search with a "*" char. You can also use "^" to limit your searches just to your history.
You don't usually need such refinement, the Awesome Bar simply does a good job by default, but given that it searches in multiple places, sometimes precision helps. See here for this trick: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
Speaking of bookmark management, Firefox also has this neat feature: "Bookmark All Tabs". You specify a folder and it saves all of your opened tabs.
Overall I feel that Firefox has the upperhand on bookmark management. Not sure why you feel it is clumsy.
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I've used Chrome for two years and still use it from time to time, for testing purposes and because I want to see how it evolves.
That said, as a Firefox supporter, I think Firefox is superior for my usage patterns. And about its UI, believe it or not, but it was its UI that made me stick with Firefox. And I'm a Mac OS and an iOS user.
I have used both extensively but i prefer Firefox for the following reasons: lower resource footprint, privacy reasons, better session recovery - to name serious few and these i believe are much more important reasons that to say the drop-down menu takes a bit of more ms.
I have stopped using chrome and now am using Opera as the secondary browser with tightened setting.
And anyways, I think by "win", they don't mean "make Chrome irrelevant". Competition drives innovation, and the Chrome team probably want to steal good ideas from Firefox, find the feature that will put them back on top, etc... They are likely to get more resources and a more interesting job than by staying alone on top.
The best part is that Mozilla and Google are not really competitors when it comes to browsers. Google doesn't make money from Chrome, it is just a gateway to their profitable services. But Firefox works too: and ad impression on Firefox is not worth less than an ad impression on Chrome.
I don't want Mozilla to win. They broke backwards compatibility with the new Servo or whatever. That's a bug.
You wouldn't say that the new train carriage, which only works on the Bosnian gauge and not on the Standard gauge (EU, US) "makes the experience better and better" even if they have free wi-fi, air-conditioning, plenty of feet space, leather seats, panoramic sunroof etc. You can't even use it, so all the extras are useless.
I took Chromium, found the perfect plugins, and never looked back at Mozilla, after 10+ years of using it. If it's broken, you can't use it, even if it's fast.
I'm now using cVim[0] plugin on Chromium. When I've switched from Firefox a year ago there was no real alternative to keysnail[1]. Backwards compatibility between Firefox releases began to break beginning of 2017. mooz, the developer of keysnail, managed to do some heroics and bring back the usability of the plugin on the never versions. Finally, Firefox 57 put the nail in the coffin and keysnail was declared dead on the spot. I've tried some alternatives for a few weeks but none could deliver. I found cVim on Chromium, and that saved the day.
See what fellytone84 had to say about keysnail, here on HN, 4 years ago [2]:
I consider Mooz's Keysnail Firefox add-on to be the most impressive keyboard oriented browsing tool. It's endlessly configurable, dotfiles in javascript--really nice to work with.For Chrome, the Vimium extension is very good, but recently I've been having a lot of fun with a similar, more configurable alternative called chromium-vim.
It looks like someone got cVim mostly working on firefox in a day, but never had time/motivation to do a real port.
So while I do miss the old extensions, and disagree strongly with how they went about it, any particular thing that's available only on chrome isn't really because chrome is better. With a little push cVim could support both browsers.
Since Firefox has similar extension interface with Chromium, any Chromium extensions should be able to work with Firefox with (relatively) small amount of works. In fact, cVim seem to be mostly works in Firefox according to its author here: https://github.com/1995eaton/chromium-vim/issues/520
Mooz has made xkeysnail which can do some of the same things, anywhere in X.
There's also a menagerie of Vimperator alikes for Firefox: Tridactyl, Vim Vixen, Surfingkeys, Vimium-FF, VVVimpulation. Most of them have improved substantially since September 2017.
Yes, I know. I'm using xkeysnail on Linux for C-n, C-p and C-m keybindings which I haven't seem to make it work in cVim. And for Windows, AHK for the same functionality.
You know that modifying the gauge for train carriages is really quite easy?
Same with browser - it's really easy to modify Firefox to work as you want it to.
I'm afraid I'm a bit of a one-issue voter when it comes to web browser, and the reason that I haven't switched to Firefox from Chrome (even though ideologically I want to) is this workflow that I use for clicking links in other apps. I open an incognito/private browser window in the foreground, then click the link in the other application. In Chrome, this opens the link in the incognito window. In Firefox, this opens the link in a normal browser window. In order to open the link in a private browser window, I have to manually copy paste the link between applications into the private window. I follow this workflow when the link is some site that I don't generally visit, or don't recognize, and hence don't want to access any cookies associated with my regular browser window, and importantly, also don't want to show up in my browsing history.
I recall there being an issue on Mozilla's bug tracker where someone brought this up and it was closed as a wontfix. Unless there is something about Firefox's container system that obviates my workflow, I'm still reluctantly sticking with Chrome.
Depending on the apps you're clicking links on you might be able to drag the link onto the incognito window. Still more annoying that it default opening incognito but nicer than copy/pasta.
I still haven’t switched from chrome because of the superior multi-user switching and the ability to have different proxies on different user accounts.
The new API browser.menus.overrideContext is announced with documentation links pointing to blogs, including a personal blog page with unrelated Japanese texts and anime pictures. The official documentation (MDN) has no reference to the new features. Even the API features from FF63 (august 2018) are only have a draft of documentation (e.g. Menus.getTargetElement). Documentation is important, even more for an API. I think this pattern is worrying.
That's the blog of the developer of Tree Style Tabs, who is presumably Japanese. I agree that it would be nice to have such information on MDN, and since MDN is a wiki, anyone here can do it if they feel strongly enough about it. The linked blog post contains a wealth of information describing how the API works, along with links to further explanatory posts.
Yeah, the feature is not introduced that well. It is mostly a good feature for the extension that they are talking about, TreeStyleTab[1], which explains the feature. Piro's blogpost is actually awesome. It describes the history of the feature, and how it is used today in his extension.
However, they could stand do the documentation themselves, or at least setting up the context of the blog-post a little more.
I am not worried by the reference to the post, Piro may not have the most pretty site, but his writeups are great!
In this case, I don't care much if the blog is pretty or not and who wrote it, even if Tree Style Tabs is my main reason for using Firefox. The problem is that Firefox is relying on an external source as the main explanation of their new API. Will the URL still be right in a few months? They have no control over it.
MDN is one of the best achievements of Mozilla, so I worry when I see it is not updated with their own technologies.
As mentioned above, piro_or is the developer of the popular extension this feature was tailor-made for. I imagine it is well-documented on their site because they were closely involved in the development. I see no reason not to presume the documentation hasn't been added to the wiki yet simply because the devs were working down to the wire to get it included in this release as many users have been clamoring for it. In fact, there is a fairly detailed blog post on Mozilla's site that suggests this is the case.[1] All the worst-case assumptions about Mozilla on this site are getting tiresome.
Anecdotally the scrolling performance feels better on my 2018 Macbook Pro. I've been doing heavy work all morning (lots of scrolling around) and after updating, something feels better. Can't really prove any of this scientifically but good to percieve performance improvements.
I also have a brutally long Trello card that used to choke up Firefox (not as bad on Chrome). Happy to say that is no longer happening either.
Unfortunately Gmail still looks to have optimization that only work in Chrome. For whatever reason the time from first load to seeing the compose window after clicking "compose" is brutally slow in FFX, but not in Chrome.
> Symantec CA Distrust: Due to a history of malpractice, Firefox 64 will not trust TLS certificates issued by Symantec (including under their GeoTrust, RapidSSL, and Thawte brands). Microsoft, Google, and Apple are implementing similar measures for their respective browsers.
> Multiple tab selection: We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window.
There have been reports of Google's new reCAPTCHA v3 requiring more image selection in Firefox than in Chrome, but there are no definitive information.
Do you have any privacy extensions installed or the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" about:config pref enabled? privacy.resistFingerprinting is known to cause problems with reCAPTCHA v3:
Yep. One ungracious explanation could be that Google is penalising Firefox users, but a more likely reason is that Firefox successfully blocks some of the information leakage from the browser that Google uses to decide whether a browser user is a bot or a human. I’ve no doubt that Chrome is very secure, but I do doubt that Google does much to stop it sending data back to Google controlled domains.
Well, Chrome comes from Google, so if you don’t trust Google to store your data I’d recommend not using the browser at all. I certainly don’t (apart from for unlogged-in development testing), but if you do then there shouldn’t be a problem.
I certainly don't trust Google, and I don't use any Google products. But that's a bit beside the point.
What I was trying to get at is that if data is being sent from a product to the manufacturer without your knowledge and consent, then that is a data breach no matter how trustworthy the collector of the data is. Such products cannot reasonably be called "very secure" in a blanket way.
Saying something like "very secure against outside attackers" would be more correct as, to use the Chrome example, Google is an inside attacker.
What happened between Firefox 61 and Firefox 63 ? 61 (and the versions before that) occasionally freeze or crashed on my old laptop (win7, 32bit), but just yesterday I installed 63, it runs very fast, feels very stable, has had no problem at all so far.
Just want to say thank you to the developers of Firefox. Thank you for all the hard work to continue to improve a great product.
If this release makes it actually usable on MacOS I would be so happy. Everyone says to use FireFox here, but they don't realize that it runs horribly on machines that a lot of people use to develop on.
Reading the release notes:
Improved performance for Mac and Linux users, by enabling link time optimization (Clang LTO). (Clang LTO was enabled for Windows users in Firefox 63.)
Doesn't seem like this fixes the high CPU issue on MacOS.
Maybe in another few dozen releases they'll fix it. Doesn't Mozilla realize how many people develop on MacOS? Everyone I know develops on a Mac.
When I interned at Mozilla, most of the FF devs developed on a Mac. They are not ignoring the platform. I suspect the issue is as other said, low incidence, high impact.
To be clear, this doesn't affect all macOS users. My battery reliably lasts a whole day with Firefox running throughout. That said, the subset of users who are affected, like you, suffer a lot - low prevalence, high impact.
In my case, CPU usage goes to the roof if I use a scaled resolution instead of the default one. If that is the case with all macOS users with non-default resolution, I wouldn't call it low prevalence.
Not an issue for me. I have a imac 5K and a retina mac book pro. Both with image scaling on by default. I think most recent macs have retina now.
I use Firefox exclusively and have done so for the last 2 years or so. This sounds like it could be a driver issue for specific macs. Both my macs have AMD Radeon chipsets & quad core i7s.
Anyway, I'm sure this issue is real. Bugzilla ticket numbers probably exist for it and might be more helpful than vague complaints about things being slow.
Of course some web sites are a bit unreasonably javascript heavy these days. The downside of a large screen is that pushing a lot of pixels around is not free. Usually closing any offending tabs immediately restores any cpu usage I see. I'd suggest using the new task manager thingy (page menu->more->task manager)
Anecdotal, but I've found it happens when image scaling by a factor other than 2. Affects my setup of a 4K display at 2650x1440 effective resolution, or 1.5x scaling.
Exactly this. I run at 1920x1080 effective resolution on my 15" rMBP, and 1680x945 on my 13". I see the issue on both.
When I switch to the "default" scaling (1440x900 and 1280x800, respectively), it stops. Only the 15" has a discrete GPU, eliminating that as potentially causal.
I use only Macs by default. It runs great and has for years. There's probably a real issue somewhere but it's far from as universal as your post implies.
Likewise. Not aware of any weird issues with performance in relation to Firefox. I use it exclusively. I'm on the beta channel. I can't remember the last time I had a browser crash. I generally restart it to apply new updates every few days or so.
If you have performance issues; you might want to check whether you need to blame the browser or some of your extensions.
Seconding your last point — almost every time I've had someone complain about generic Firefox or Chrome performance the problem went away as soon as they restarted it without extensions. There are certainly exceptions but misattribution is common enough that I'm not surprised to see browser vendors adding the UI to make it easier to discover.
This is a known issue, and has been around since at least v57. There are multiple Bugzilla issues on it. The cause is known. It isn't extensions. The fix is just invasive, and apparently ongoing.
That’s true but not what this thread was about. The person I responded to above was making a very broad claim, which is wrong, and jillesvangurp agreed with the observation and added a general point which is correct. There is a specific issue affecting a subset of people with less common configurations but that doesn’t make the sweeping claim true or the recognition that browser performance issues are notoriously poorly attributed untrue.
The thread-parent absolutely cast a wider net than warranted, but everyone in this discussion who has experienced this problem knows exactly which one we're talking about, and the rest are all, "I've never seen a problem!" or "It's probably just extensions." Meanwhile, there's reliably a sub-thread somewhere in the discussion on nearly every article about Firefox, about this problem.
I find it profoundly ironic that you comment down-thread that "humans are very prone to confusing things which affect them personally with the general case" about a thing which you haven't personally experienced. You talk as if those of us for whom this is a 100% reproducible problem are an edge case, based AFAICT solely on your own not suffering it, coupled with your (not incorrect) beliefs about people poorly attributing performance problems in general.
I was aware of the issue already but that’s also why I knew that the biggest impact comes from a non-default setting. I never said that it wasn’t a real problem, or that it doesn’t warrant attention — only that it wasn’t as broad as claimed and that is a very common problem with browser issues because everyone uses them but people who don’t have problems generally don’t go around posting that everything is fine whereas the percentage of users who are affected will complain regularly.
Do you require a scientific study for any fact? If you bothered to do any googling, or whatever Mozilla equivalent of google is - this is in the top 3 results. https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/02/15-inch-macbook-pro-screen-re... Scaled resolution is defaulted on a huge amount of Macs.
I asked for data because humans are very prone to confusing things which affect them personally with the general case. Since Mozilla uses telemetry heavily I tend to trust their prioritization more than random self-selected commenters.
> Improved performance for Mac and Linux users, by enabling link time optimization (Clang LTO). (Clang LTO was enabled for Windows users in Firefox 63.)
Anecdotally, it seems to be flying through pages it used to struggle on when I last tried it (~version 60). Tab switching seems faster too, but I haven't had enough time to put it through its paces yet. Fairly promising so far, though!
I've been suffering from these performance issues since I started trying Firefox again around version 57. I can say that this version finally feels like they've fixed the performance issues, at least for me.
That said, I've thought this before and turned out to be wrong. But it looks like it might be real this time.
I have used Firefox since the early 2000s, and it has been frustrating to see performance get worse even as my hardware gets better. I realize that this is mainly the fault of bloated websites, but I can also see that Chrome and Safari are faster than Firefox.
I recently switched to Brave Developer Edition [1], which now supports Chrome extensions (which I need for work/pleasure). It runs circles around Firefox and Chrome, and maintains my privacy better.
Previously it was a tradeoff of getting speed (Chrome) or maintaining privacy (Firefox). For me, Brave does better on both counts, and now that it supports extensions I'm completely sold.
If Brave is running circles around Chrome for you in general, that's likely a result of cognitive bias, since last I checked it's the same rendering engine.
For pageloads Brave might do better if it blocks various stuff by default, of course.
I am quite aware of what Brave's value proposition is. Generally when people are only talking about pageload performance they say so, because there are many other performance metrics relevant to web browsers, some of which are arguably more important for most users...
I wrote a comment about this a couple days ago on another thread:
I wish we had a simple UI we could bring up to expose cookies to other tabs (arbitrarily). I just want a list of cookies with rows marked in green if they're being sent with requests, red rows for cookies that would normally be sent for the same [sub]domain but are currently not, and then gray cookies that are established from completely unrelated domains. To me this would be better than maintaining tab profiles/containers that are for business/personal/etc. This would be like a one-off UI before you determine if you want to establish a container profile.
Also I want them to take tree tabs seriously. There is a plugin for this, but it doesn't look like a tree at all.. I am grateful for the plugin, I just wish it were a UI effort focused on. I cannot maintain more than 40 tabs open and easily browse through them. I'm tired of the response being "well don't".
AFAIK it's enabled by default in Nightly for some desktop Windows users. There's an about:config pref that others can use to enable it. Follow the WebRender blog for more information: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/
Not yet. There were some A/B experiments in Firefox 64 Beta for Windows users with Nvidia GPUs, but there are still some bugs to fixed. You can manually enabled WebRender in Firefox Nightly builds (but not Beta or Release channel) by setting the "gfx.webrender.all" about:config pref to true.
DevTools UI is actually currently being re-written with React, so it can be more easily hacked on and benefit from all the performance work Quantum brings. Check out https://github.com/devtools-html to see the progress of this work.
Serious question: Is this a special 64-bit edition, or is it just version number 64?
I wondered this yesterday because suffixing with "64" is a common way to denote such a thing. I looked into it and as far as I could tell, no, it's just version 64 of Firefox, so I mentioned that in an attempting-to-be-helpful comment here, but it got downvoted. So now I'm wondering if my research was wrong. Can anyone clarify, please? I'm really confused about this now.
One frustration I have is that Firefox Mobile doesn't yet support Android Oreo autofill, which means it doesn't work with any of the major password managers. If you use FF Desktop it's convenient to use it on mobile as well given that history and such can be easily synced, but having to go back to copying and pasting passwords manually is quite a pain. Would love to see that implemented soon.
I really want bookmarks with a specified container. I have a dedicated container for each of multiple Google apps/G Suite accounts I have and my personal Google account. It would be great to be able to specify what account to use along with the bookmark when saving a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet instead of manually opening the correct container first.
I've been through netscape, prodigy, aol, and IE5. Mozilla really made the web better during those days as IE5 dominance really stagnant the web scene at the same the current web dev pace seems crazy. I'm glad for innovation and for mozilla. Will always be a fan and will be using this over chrome any day. I trust Mozilla more than Google.
Assuming you're on non-Windows, the message is expected and not indicative of a problem. I've pushed a patch to disable it going forward. Sorry for the noise.
Offtopic for sure, but the way most places I've worked have used the terms is: "alpha" means that the developers think it's done. "beta" means QA thinks it's done. "release" means that actual user testing revealed no showstoppers.
Damn, since the update the browser SSH is not working anymore in the Google Cloud console with Firefox 64. Had to install Google Chrome to make it work... Let's see where this overcomplicating of the web by Google leads to ;-)
Ctrl+Tab doesn't work on Mac like other more popular or well-known browsers on any OS... Having a basic often-used feature go against the grain is a disconcerting choice that has caused me to switch back to Brave and Chrome.
What do you mean by this? If you mean ctrl-tab switching to tabs in most recent used order, there is an option for that now. It's actually on by default in new profiles in Firefox. The previous behavior (in order switching) was left for existing profiles, to avoid disruption.
It'd be nice if one of these days Firefox were made portable again. Right now it really isn't an option, either to built or run, on anything without a shitton of memory.
I've switched to Firefox since the account login integration in Chrome. I now they've reverted this decision, but I'm much happier with Firefox since then.
Are there a command pop up with tab search and mouse gestures built in yet? These as well as multitab selection kinda won me over to Vivaldi a year and bit back
The same person who managed to make the text and background color not clash will also be able handle two scrollbar colors responsibly. Take e.g. a textarea that gains focus and has the both scrollbar and border change color, what's so terrible about that?
No sarcasm, and that question wasn't rhetorical either: How is a scrollbar that different from other input elements within webpages that can already be styled?
And what do you mean by using non-default colors? User stylesheets would also include scrollbar colors anyway; do you mean just setting a background but no text color (assuming a default of black, which might not be black for the user)? Don't see how this could apply to this CSS property, since it takes two colors, you either set both or none.
It seems logical to me that if you can read the text on the web page, that is, if the web dev hasn't made the common mistake that renders the text unreadable, they will set the scrollbar colors to something of similar "quality". If you can't read the text because they use CSS badly, then the scrollbar color is the least of your worries. QED?
Generally speaking, there are a lot of "common webdev mistakes", like using the giant images and scaling them down, having text and background color very close together... but we don't take that away just because some abuse it, so resisting more flexibility on those grounds doesn't strike me as so "obvious" as people seem to agree it is. If you can allow websites to hide the mouse cursor, I don't think the web will break because of this CSS property. If you don't want to see it on any page, override it in your user stylesheet, done.
What do you mean, as well? That's the only bit you didn't ignore.. and it's useful for when you draw your own cursor in WebGL. I can't think of a single time I ever saw it abused, I guess I don't frequent the kind of website that would.
By "as well", I mean "as well as objecting to web devs being able to alter the appearance of browser controls".
Yes, I do see the usefulness of being able to do all of those things, but in practice, I don't appreciate it when it's done. I'm not saying that it's abusive (and I'm not talking about egregious misuse of these abilities), I'm just saying that I personally dislike it when sites do this sort of thing.
I fear that I've come off as too militant on these issues -- as a web dev, you should do what you deem best. As a user, if your choices are too annoying to me, I'll just avoid your site.
I think this whole thing just plays into a personal issue I have over the web these days... from a usability and aesthetic standpoint, the web has been noticeably declining for me over the past few years.
> I do see the usefulness of being able to do all of those things, but in practice, I don't appreciate it when it's done.
That I can certainly agree with. I also think users should be able to override and customize things... ideally, everybody gets more options? And user agents should absolutely be user agents, instead of brochure displays.
While design may be somewhat subjective, I also think websites are getting worse. If that's a "personal issue", we both have it :D Just the last one I just looked at, that made me think "why? who is this for?"
I just think marketing (and mobile?) play a much larger role in the downfall of the web and the rise of generic copy drowning in padding, than all the stuff we can do with CSS.
Those controls are not part of the content, they are part of the application or operating environment itself, and I have configured them the way that I want them.
As such, they should be off limits to web designer's whims.
As an aside, my experience with web sites over the years (particularly recently) doesn't exactly give me a great deal of confidence that they would make appropriate choices for the appearance of these controls.
> Those controls are not part of the content, they are part of the application or operating environment itself, and I have configured them the way that I want them.
Depends on the browser, but e.g. text area colors can be styled anyway (and therefore made unusable, how irresponsible that CSS allows for this), and whether scrollbars show up in the first place is CSS, too. You can override that with user stylesheets if you want, but no need to hardcode that for everybody.
> doesn't exactly give me a great deal of confidence that they would make appropriate choices for the appearance of these controls.
You're now the third person to say this, and the second to do so while ignoring what I responded to that point, so again:
If you can't read the text, why do you care about the scrollbar? If you can read the text, why do you worry about the scrollbar? In what conceivable practical scenario do you gain anything? The very same people who picked all the other colors might also color the scrollbar, but how is going to make a default scrollbar make an otherwise unusable site usable?
We can already hide scrollbars, but coloring them differently, that's a problem? I don't buy it, as they say. How is an ugly scrollbar, or one that uses the same color twice and is unusable that way, worse than none?
That's the point.. since you probably woulnd't argue for taking away background and text color, you already "trust" web devs with those. If a website is unreadable, the scrollbar doesn't matter. If it's readable, the scrollbar will look great, too. Also see other comment.
> That's the point.. since you probably woulnd't argue for taking away background and text color, you already "trust" web devs with those.
I would, reader modes are a godsend that revert the web back to how it should have always been, with the client controlling the text and background color in a way consistent with the rest of the system.
Content display should be up to the user, not the designer.
I never used them, but Opera had a few preset user stylesheets right there in the "view" menu at the top of the window, that was neat. One was "C64" IIRC. Silly, but neat ^^
If styleesheets could have placeholders for some system colors (maybe even fonts?), that could be something.. turn nightmode on/off, or just generally change colors, and all programs and all websites fade! I would actually love "having to" make 3 stylesheets, one super fancy one, a print stylesheet, and a "system colors" one. Or don't even stop with colors, do it like Magic User Interface on the Amiga, let the user configure how they want all sorts of input and information fields to be formatted and behave... some people want material design (they're wrong of course, but if they must be wrong, I want them to at least be wrong and happy, rather than wrong and unhappy), others want gradients and bevels and shadows everywhere, let everybody set it how they want. Some people want lots of padding, others want tight padding and negative linespacing and tiny fonts, etc.
Awww, now I'm super excited about something that doesn't exist... I can taste it, it would be so awesome! This is the wrong timeline :/
EDIT: Dang, guess the spittle brigade is really out in force today. Anyone downvoting want to maybe respond in substance as to why they think Firefox should continue ignoring security issues that have been open since the Bush administration?
gave firefox a try but what is up with the bookmarks? 4 clicks to get to them and the UI looks like something out of the 90s? am i missing something obvious?
Answering my own question... it is, indeed, markedly better than the last new release I tried. It was really janky looking for a while. It still doesn't look as clean as Chrome's tab bar, but it's reasonable now. So props to the Mozilla team on that.
I think I liked the more triangle shaped tabs as well, but w/r/t Firefox, there was a recent release (couple of months ago?) where the tab-bar was all kinds of jacked up. Maybe it was just a short-lived bug or something... what it was, it looks a lot better now.
What do you mean by that. Seems like a bit of a troll comment. They both have totally different codebases so the only real thing thats the same is they are both browsers and they both support the same web standard. Would you like them to fork html/css/js and make everything incompatible?
In case anyone else is confused as I was, the "64" in "Firefox 64" appears to be the version number and not referring to a 64-bit edition or something other special edition.
Interesting. I am ux designer and i never thought people care about this or even realize there is difference. I mean actually quite opposite lot of people i know were confused from the movements first time this feature landed in safari.
Anyway surely this is not a showstopper. I mean it is not functional in any way.
Scrollbars that auto-hide and bounce scrolling are standard behavior for any macOS application.
Apps that don't do this both look and feel weird.
Maybe not a showstopper if Firefox were offering unavailable-anywhere-else behavior, but it's completely natural and predicable that users will migrate to one of the other two major browsers that care enough to make themselves fit in w/ the system they are running on.
Well Firefox is actually offering "unavailable-anywhere-else behavior" - it's free software that does not require you to log in and send private browsing data to google. This is the case for anyone having google account - which is almost everyone.
(Also called rubber-band scroll or elastic-scrolling)
macOS feature adopted from iOS where when you try to scroll past the end of a document, rather than just doing nothing, it sort of stretches/bounces/rubber-bands past the bounds and then snaps back.
It's nice because (1) it feels believable and physical (2) it gives you feedback that you really are at the end of the document, rather than just the computer lagging.
Yessss. It doesn't happen often, but the times when I open up 6-10 tabs for research but then decide they deserve their own window so I can focus on them (and subsequently drag them out one by one) is still a lot.