Firefox 69.0 Released
mozilla.org> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound.
Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it!
Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?
And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser?
P.S. I already had autoplay for videos without sound disabled through about:config flags, but some videos managed to autoplay anyway. I wonder if they also fixed that issue, or simply made the about:config flag part of the settings dialog.
> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?
There was a bubble awhile back when advertisers were being told that video had better metrics, and all of the news sites jumped on higher-paying ads. That seems to have tapered off as advertisers noticed poor returns and learned that Facebook had been massively misrepresenting the metrics (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/advertisers-alle...) but it’ll take years to de-pivot everyone’s shiny new toys and the staffing invested in producing low information density content.
We may never be free of it; it's gone on long enough that there's a whole generation that's grown up thinking it's normal to get information by watching a five minute video that conveys the same information as five lines of text.
People that choose 5-minute videos over 5 lines of text probably aren't doing it because they can't do the latter. They do the former to fill time. Popcorn for the brain, if you're bored.
I often wonder, why are people so bored? I'm fighting off doing my typical "old man rant" but I often hear people dream of a life where they have no responsibilities, but then I notice that most people fill their time with fluff -- because they are bored. I do it myself, even!
Fun fact: I'm on HN posting this post, not because this is what I want to do, but because it was the easiest thing I could think of starting to do after I finished up some work. If only it were easier to aim at stuff that I actually want to do... Hmmm...
Cal Newport's latest book Digital Minimalism has some tips, but none of them are quick-fixes.
"Get a challenging hobby" is basically the idea. Which is a great idea! I just have to, y'know, do it...
Commutes and jobs are soaking up more time, most people live in places with increased travel times to anything, and there’s never been more opportunity for easy distraction - why spend 40 minutes round trip driving somewhere to do something when you can watch Netflix on the couch?
Most importantly, though, are smartphones: you didn’t used to have so much just a second away anywhere you went. There’s an entire industry building entertainment for people in lines, on transit, walking to their car, etc. so I don’t think it’s as much that distraction is replacing previous big activities but filling in lots of space throughout the day.
decades probably, I still have people insisting on getting their meta keywords right is of top tier importance. i blame libraries keeping old online marketing how to books from the 90's on the shelves.
It won't de-pivot, advertising techniques are a ratchet and they all become yet more products or options that agencies & sites provide. We'd still be getting popunder Netflix ads from Zedo if browser makers hadn't shut that functionality down.
If advertisers aren’t seeing returns, they’ll eventually shift spending since video ads are expensive to produce and place. I wouldn’t bet against them finding something even more annoying, however.
Of course they're going to come up with new and exciting forms of interruption, but "shift spending" is extremely malleable, and agencies will still provide the feature for a price. Also, it's my understanding that there are no "returns" per se on brand advertising (vs. product advertising), regardless of medium.
No “returns” in directly measurable sales but all but the most unconcerned companies are going to look at interactions and ask whether they’re getting enough versus the cost, especially since the Facebook measurement scandal got a lot of attention.
The word "enough" is doing a lot of work there.
Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.
With ublock origin you can block loading of media above a certain size.
You can pair that with addon called, "Image video block" https://github.com/tiborbarsi/image-video-block-browser-addo...
And finally, you can use Bandwidth hero to compress images on the fly. You need to host the server instance on Heroku. Their free tier should suffice
Niceee...As someone recently put in the same.position as OP is great to know there are options around. I almost dropped Mozilla for this autoplaying mute videos crap.
Or even worse (and anecdotally more common), a video that is hardly relevant or from a year-old story.
> 5KB news article
On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.
I created https://legiblenews.com/ because of this frustration ... and took it all the way to the level where loading a page is exactly 1 request.
The other frustration I’ve had with news websites is they don’t link to source material, so it’s impossible to dig into a topic and accidentally learn something.
I like the way you make the categories. Finally, someone calling a spade is a spade.
Eg. "Disasters and accidents" had disasters and accidents.
It did highlight how much of our news isn't the most uplifting of topics however.
I like it. However given your goal of delivering sane and lighweight news articles you might want to extend that mission to the selection of your sources and consider excluding some. For the Boris Johnson story you link to The Independent, which returns a 14 MB article (while autplaying is disabled in Firefox) and basically has become a collection of worst practices when it comes to user experience and web development. Surely there must be better sources for popular stories like these.
The data comes from [Wikipedia's Current Events portal][1], so the site's author isn't directly choosing those sources.
Cool site Brad.I havent heard of it.
Nice!
This would be slightly more legible if there was a clearer distinction between the tags introducing each item and the text of the item itself.
Also, it would be more usable if the dates in the URLs were numeric and international-style (ISO-8601 / xkcd-1179).
But nice!
There is still a text only version of NPR that is exceptionally lightweight.
They probably thought they're pulling a number on GDPR compliance, but created the best news reading experience in process...
There's CNN Lite as well. https://lite.cnn.com/en
I wish they would use more of that on mobile or even the old m.cnn.com. The more recent trend of "www-m.cnn.com" URLs is glacially slow, even when going through a Raspberry Pi.
I haven't looked at the actual data, but if I go to cnn.com, which I visit routinely enough, I imagine most of the assets are already cached. The ads and embedded video, though, are a bandwidth sink.
Wikipedia Current Events portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events is 40K for me with cached data.
I think the point was the news article itself is only 5KB. The rest is website fluff.
HN comments? It's as much "news" as the vast majority of major sites...
comments are a poor replacement for journalism.
But surprisingly better than what often passes for journalism.
NPR + rejecting cookies under their GDPR scheme makes the page a dream.
Also note https://text.npr.org/
Why are you spending so much? There are many ways to get bandwidth for less. AT&T Home Wireless (doesn't have to be used at home) is $1/GB. There are many resellers of unlimited hotspots. Sometimes deals come up, like Verizon's now discontinued prepaid unlimited hotspot for $65/m.
With rates like that I'm surprised you don't use NoScript with a whitelist.
unless you turn off images, sound and video and probably javascript, I'm afraid you're gonna have a bad time with that "5kb" news article.
> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much
Advertising metrics.
> And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser?
I believe autoplay is off by default on mobile, so it's a significant market.
Good. I live rural and have heavily metered LTE as my Internet, or else it's really slow satellite or P2P wireless. Auto-play video is the bane of my existence; every website seems to assume these days that if you're on desktop, you have giant bandwidth.
> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?
Probably so they can show advertisers that every month, they stream XXX terabytes of video, thereby getting these advertisers to pay them more money.
Not technically a lie as long as you don't pretend people are actually watching these videos.
The fascinating part is how advertisers fall for that every time. How can this still be a problem?
if everyone does it, maybe it becomes a useful metric of how many user-hours you get?
Yes, thank god.
I've never understood why news sites push silent video down your throat. They are wasting serious amounts bandwidth.
"Why do websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time you want?"
Perhaps the websites (website owners) are not the only ones who are motivated to push for inclusion of autoplaying videos. Some sources suggest ad fraud is one of the major drivers of online advertising.1 Sources also suggest that video works especially well for ad fraud.2,3,4 If there is a shift toward using video for advertising,5 then it makes sense that commercial websites would prefer ads (videos) to be shown (play) to the visitor automatically (autoplay). It stands to reason that commercially-funded browser authors, e.g., Firefox,6 will always want to implement features that cater to its primary stakeholders: commercial websites and the online ad industry.
1 https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-frau...
2 https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/
3 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banne...
4 http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/
5 https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts...
6 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...
Video codecs compress better than GIFs, so auto playing video elements can be used for this.
But why does a news article need video?
when you're tired after work, watching a video is easier than reading. the longer you're watching videos on top-quality-journalism.example.com the longer they can serve you ads
CPCV, Cost Per Completed View. Advertisers pay more for completed ad views.
There's about a thousand cynical answers to your question, but the truth is simply that not everyone is like your (or me): all measures (return visits, pages/visit, conversions, etc) just happen to be better for autoplaying video.
I would totally agree with you and the others that it's an annoying practice. Yet then again when I blanket-banned autoplay, I was annoyed by youtube videos no longer doing it.
Turns out we like it where we expect it. Just not from random google results to sites we rarely visit.
We like it on pages where the only reason to go to the page is to view the video. In these cases, autoplay saves time. And they're clearly distinct from cases where someone might go to a page for reasons other than viewing that video. (Examples: a news site with a text story, Youtube's channel pages)
> I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it!
Twitch does this, which is very annoying, because (on Firefox for Android) I have to unmute the video every time. As far as I know there's no way to allow audio to autoplay on a specific site on FfA.
Hopefully this moves web developers in the direction of either requesting autoplay permission (if they need it) or not autoplaying at all.
Glad. I do affiliate marketing, and as part of my research into this area I have to look at hundreds of landing pages with talking heads explaining how to buy cheap cialis. One notable ploy they use is autoplaying audio & video to grab your attention. Little do they realize that users instantly find the offending video and close the tab. Autoplay actually increases the churn rate.
Yesterday I was reading an article and, part way through, a video started playing on the sidebar. I saw it, thought it looked interesting, but wanted to finish the article before watching. I paused the video. As I scrolled further the video resumed (reproducibly). By the time I'd finished the article it was auto-playing a new video, and there was no way to find the original.
I was excited for a second, but ESPN's site still autoplays videos, e.g.:
https://www.espn.com/college-football/boxscore?gameId=401110...
Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?
Because forced exposure to advertising pays better than letting you decide when to consume it (if you ever do).
Not to mention the waste of bandwidth - imagine being on a metered connection and forgetting a Bloomberg tab in the background. It will happily stream a neverending series of videos for hours if I remember correctly.
That's going to break textural videos too, isn't it? :(
Kind of silly that animated gifs will continue to work fine, but as soon as you try to use a format that doesn't take up a ridiculous amount of bandwidth...
Just bookmark https://www.bbc.com/news and you'll be happy.
there is a preference now that lets you block both audio and video inside about:preferences | security & privacy | autoplay permissions. so you probably don't need to do the about:config thing.
> For our users in the US or using the en-US browser, we are shipping a new “New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of Pocket’s content.
With all due respect, if you have to call it an "experience" you know it's something nobody asked for :p
Im probably in the minority, but I think its a good way to compete with Edge/MSN. The clickbait I get out of the pocket new tab page is infinitely more interesting than MSN, which has too much focus on salacious current events.
Sounds like a lesser evil rather than idea worth competing with.
I like the Pocket recommendations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd be fine if they limited it to just unpaid recommendations, but they include sponsored pocket stories in the new page tab too. It's inserting advertising into the web browser in a round-about way.
Good thing you can turn it off?
If you're not paying Mozilla for their browser, it seems weird to me to bitch and complain about ways Mozilla explores to generate some revenue without selling out their user's privacy. Especially when they make it very easy to opt out of the thing you don't like. Comments like yours are what makes me very nervous about the future for Mozilla. They are still entirely at the mercy of Google and their revenue sharing agreement for enabling Google as the default search engine. The day that ends, they are going to be in deep trouble if their user base is so hostile to any potential avenues they choose to explore to stay afloat.
> "without selling out their user's privacy"
This is the key. I think sending any unsolicited traffic to 3rd party websites counts as violating my privacy. Pocket goes far beyond that.
Pocket Recommendations are personalized based on your browsing behavior in Firefox. It doesn't matter that Mozilla and Pocket don't see your browsing history directly. While the choice of which links to push at you are made client side if Pocket knows which pages are suggested to you (either as they are pushed to your browser or after you've clicked them) then they can take away from that information about why you were targeted for those sites.
Sure enough, Pocket collects stats on which links show up in your browser and whether or not you click on them.
"Sponsored stories" often link to DoubleClick or Bitly who redirect you to the suggested site so those companies are also collecting your data because of Pocket. Handing data to DoubleClick is not protecting user's privacy.
Even if you opt out of data collection in Firefox's preferences Pocket and Mozilla will continue to serve you personalized sites and will continue to collect data on you and your browsing history.
I don't mind that pocket exists, but it shouldn't be enabled by default, and it shouldn't take going into about:config to disable.
Firefox should be applauded for taking steps to try to make money off their user's personal information without selling it outright, but at the end of the day they are still trying to make money off their user's personal information.
They do have to compete with Google, but they can best do that by providing a better experience for users and by protecting their privacy.
I've been a long time user of firefox because it's still the best browser when it comes to privacy and control, but it takes an increasing number of default setting changes and about:config edits to get it to stop leaking my data to 3rd parties. It's already to the point where I can't just recommend it to others without explaining there are a ton of settings they should immediately disable or change to protect themselves.
Whats really interesting to me is that this seems to be more of a huge marketing issue. Pocket IS Mozilla* and it seems like people would be more ok with the integration if they knew this. Now, obviously, Mozilla does need to improve the sponsored stories and not track the user without input, but at the same time, its not a 3rd party in the general stance.
* https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
> Pocket IS Mozilla* and it seems like people would be more ok with the integration if they knew this.
I'm less forgiving. The Pocket service is proprietary - this technology couldn't fall into the right hands - and it directly competes against open web standards like RSS/Atom. I honestly don't know how they justify it against the Mozilla Manifesto.
Good info! I had no idea it was a subsidiary of Mozilla. I was even at pockets website and I didn't see any obvious indication.
That still leaves them on the hook for sending your data to companies like DoubleClick. I hope it also means the data the pocket guys are collecting will fall under Mozilla's policies because I've been trusting them so far not to sell my data to anyone willing to pay for it, while generally I wouldn't put that kind of faith in a targeted adverting company.
where's the button that gives me the paid version, and is it just a donation or a version that gives me a better, ahem, experience?
You can make a donation, and turn off the feature. That means everyone who can't/doesn't want to make a donation can still have the same experience as you, and you can still support FF.
Haha, if Mozilla ever hid a "better" experience browser behind a paywall I bet you would be here excoriating them for that move. The general feeling of entitlement that some people in the open source side of things have is quite astounding. They want everything possible, but absolutely for free and then justify how absurd it all is by saying people will pay in droves if only Mozilla made this magical, perfect, privacy-first browser. It's just tragic and I feel so bad for Mozilla in general given the total apathy that most technical minded people have towards their plight and long term financial sustainability.
You and me both! I've had some great recommendations!
A lot of the recommendations are great. But there's also some ones recommending low-interest credit cards. I also like Pocket as software. Easily allows me to save pages for later reading and tag them as a method to introduce some organization to all the interesting pages one finds. Since I use Firefox across many devices, this makes my life easier.
Agreed! I find many of the recommendations useful. (I also use Pocket personally for bookmarking sites.)
I just wish they'd once and for all drop Pocket.
At what point do they understand that it's a failed experiment if they constantly have to re-enable and/or "ship" an "experience"?
Pocket should be an official addon that you can uninstall. It seems unfair to all the other addons.
or at least make it an extension. But they know people would uninstall it if they were given the option.
People are given the option to disable it in Options/Preferences and most of them don't. What makes you think implementing it as an extension with a similar disable capability just in the Add-ons Manager instead of Options/Preferences would be any different?
Exactly what setting are you referring to? Because the one they list on their website is in "about:config" [1], and anytime you go into about:config, Mozilla scares users about voiding their warranty. Only tech-savy power users are going to attempt that.
> In the address bar, type about:config and press Enter.
> 1. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear. Click I accept the risk! to continue to the about:config page.
> 2. Type pocket in the Search box above the list of preferences.
> 3. Double-click the extensions.pocket.enabled preference to toggle its value to false.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-po...
What's preventing Mozilla from shipping it as an extension?
Looks like if you're disabled Pocket, that "experience" is disabled.
Yeah I don't see any pocket crap on the new tab page as I had pocket set to disabled.
I wonder what this means exactly and how it could possibly be worse than what's already the default.
I agree. I've been a Pocket user for years longer than Mozilla has owned them. The New Tab page should not be making any external requests. If I want to see Pocket content I'll look at Pocket.
It didn't make it to the developer notes, but Firefox 69 should be the first one to ship with unhandledrejection event on by default[0] - I'm so looking forward to being able to catch promises and do proper error handling on them in Firefox without having to jump through hoops
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/unha...
> It didn't make it to the developer notes
I see it here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
Oh yes, you're right. It obviously just didn't make into the release announcement
But according to that page Safari still lacks support. Seems like that could cause enough issues alone to just skip using it.
Fantastic, I was hoping Firefox will implement this finally.
For our users in the US or using the en-US browser, we are shipping a new “New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of Pocket’s content.
Uhmmm...
It _really_ bugs me that pocket isn't packaged as a pre-installed extension, that you can uninstall normally.
I'd up vote you more than once if I could.
Originally when Firefox was released it was the antidote to browser forced add ons that were common at the time. I have vague recollections of Netscape Navigator having whole sections of what was essentially ads forced in the browser menu.
I don't like Pocket being built in, as it should be a browser add on. It also sets precedence. It starts the chain of thought - "Well Firefox has Pocket, so lets add backed in thing X too". I wish it wasn't baked it as it goes against the whole of Firefox's original philosophy of being light weight and everything else an add on.
I'm in the same boat - I like Pocket, but I don't think it should be built-in to Firefox. I don't see the issue with making it an extension/plugin.
I have pocket disabled and I don't see any pocket stuff in Firefox.
But you can disable it quite easily:
about:config -> extensions.pocket.enabled: false
i would find it very surprising if more than 2 or 3% of firefox users have ever used about:config at all
that's not 'easy' for most people.
I don't see anyone complaining that Safari has a built-in Reader feature. Safari even has "Siri Suggestions" almost identical to this Firefox experiment. Pocket has been acquired by Mozilla, so it's not a 3rd party feature any more. It's really no different.
It seems that some people are just used to hating Pocket as if it was some kind of tradition.
People are mostly hating the advertising on the New Page from Pocket, not Pocket itself these days.
EDIT: Here's a screenshot of the feature specifically that people dislike these days: https://imgur.com/a/p2rD4AY
While it can be disabled, it can be said that people are a bit annoyed that the browser that is "Privacy Focused" is shoving ads down your throat. While we as technical users can figure out how to disable it easily (in the preferences), the less technically inclined might not know that they can be disabled.
Advertising, tracking, and privacy are three separate concerns. We conflate them due to the way current advertising networks work: they track you, storing + analyzing the data in centralized servers (which violates your privacy), to deliver ads.
You can deliver ads without tracking (for example, contextually based upon the page you are looking at, without any storage of that information or historical state.) And you can track users without violating their privacy (by not sending the data to a remote server and only analyzing it locally.) So in general, it's certainly possible to be able to preserve a user's privacy while also be monetizing your product through advertising.
Now of course, most people dislike ads, which is a separate issue. But advertising is not inherently a violation of privacy, at least if you see privacy through the lens of surveillance by a third party. (You could stretch the definition of privacy to a point where seeing ads I suppose could be privacy violating, but I don't feel my privacy is being violated when I see a billboard on the highway, for example.)
Advertising is an issue of user autonomy and a user's security in their autonomy. Users don't want to see ads. A browser that is supposed to be "for the users" shouldn't have its main screen be something that their users specifically do not want.
For most of us, adware is a type of malware. For Mozilla, they have a tradeoff between user autonomy and cash flow. They can at least say that the bad things they do are because of the sacks of cash and not for any positive user "experience." Lying about it makes it worse, not better.
Aside from ads, there is the issue that Firefox comes with backdoors (see Mr. Robot ad) and spyware (see telemetry that can't be opted out of.)
Which bits of telemetry can't be opted out of? I've set at least a hundred things in my about:config to tamp down on it but I'm never quite sure I've got all of them.
I'm one of those "don't mind ads, do mind privacy intrusions" crowd. I'd be perfectly willing to turn off my adblocker for good if only advertisers would be willing to turn off their tracking and scripts and stick to only serving up JPEG banners.
Alas, that's not likely. So I do what I can to use web services ethically - pay for services where possible (like Fastmail), whitelist when a site owner seems to be using ethical non-tracking ads, donate where appropriate (like open source developers looking for help with hosting fees).
the data can be processed locally, but when my browser says, “get me the ad about debt relief”, it's leaking private info. that's why contextual ads are always better.
If you follow the "How it works" link, they state that everyone is sent the same set of ads. Your local browser chooses what to recommend from that set. I was happy to see they designed it in a privacy-conscious manner.
It's a 1 click option to disable sponsored stories In the Settings>Home page, and on the desktop, the setting falls right in the middle of the screen, so it's not hidden away.
And you can also use a single click to disable Pocket suggestions entirely.
I honestly don't see any reason to complain there.
Mozilla killed a private Reading List feature and replaced it with Pocket. They carefully denied getting paid for the integration before eventually revealing that they got paid for new subscriptions. They promised to open source Pocket when they acquired it and still haven't.
What Mozilla calls "the best of Pocket's content" is ads and articles that border on clickbait. Some people don't like marketing doublespeak.
Genuine question,so which option do you recommend for linux/windows
You can turn off the ads and clickbait. I still like Firefox more than other browsers. I still trust Mozilla more than other companies. I just think people have legitimate complaints.
I'm even OK with this feature, just not with the we're shipping a new “New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of... drone-speak T_T
Yeah, the best New Tab experience is about:blank.
I'm usually in agreement with that, but I admit I've found the occasional article that drew my attention from Firefox's new tab page. Maybe once every week or two over that last couple months. That may or may not be enough to justify its existence (for me, at least), but it's not nothing. I obviously got some value out of it.
I am 100% team blank tab.
When I open a new tab, I am "on task" - I have a problem that needs answering and the last thing I want is any distraction. Everything from news articles, todo lists or witty quotes is counter-productive to staying on task. It's almost the worst possible time to be shoving some unrequested content into my face to break concentration and pull me in the wrong direction.
Yeah, I get so much value from Pocket that I even switched from Instapaper.
It's not Pocket that's the problem, it's the gross attempted force-feeding (that just makes me want to try some other browser like Brave (not an endorsement, just what I personally would investigate next)).
How about, instead of "we plastered all this shit from the crap we bought onto every single browser window you henceforth open, you mindless peon!": how about they did some promo graphic and well-done animated enticement, along the lines of, "Hey! Pocket has tons of subscribers who upvote the most meaningful and relevant stories to them — how about we replace your blank homepage with the best of the best?"
But instead they're just like EAT THIS SHIT PLEEB and you know what fuck it I did just switch my default browser while typing this. :middle-finger-emoji-that-HNs-1970s-site-generator-isnt-compatible-with:
Reminds me of when a musician onstage yells for you to MAKE SOME NOOOIISE!! Um no, the deal is, you be up there and be really good, and fill me with such delight that I can't keep quiet and make a bunch of nooooiise.
Last time I installed Brave, the new tab page had a link to a cryptocurrency news site (probably a paid placement).
If you want the least-gross behavior, it's not going to come from a for-profit startup.
Maybe not, but it seems to be the least annoying right now.
I've never seen it show me an ad (including paid placement type ads) so far. I guess if they junked up their new tab page with intrusive encouragement to start using Brave Rewards and Basic Attention Token (BAT) then that would sort of be the equivalent of what Firefox is doing...
It doesn't block ads very well for me on iOS, and it's really buggy and unstable. My Firefox experience is excellent on every device that supports it. It's unfortunate and frustrating that all iOS browsers are just Safari.
"you know what fuck it I did just switch my default browser while typing this. :middle-finger-emoji"
Hell yeah! Stick it to the man! Totally consume that content with a different browser!
Could you share why you prefer Pocket to Instapaper?
maximalism: maximizing the amount of stuff you have with hopes of getting SOME value out of them.
minimalism: minimalizing the amount of stuff you have with hopes of getting LOTS of value out of them.
If that's what best for you, its trivial to change it in about:preferences (in the "Home" section). What's "best" for everybody is hard to define, I would bet that Mozilla has studied this significantly more than Grue3 has.
I love how you're unquestionably endorsing studies whos motivations are unclear. Best for who? Users? Mozilla? And to what end? Usability? Profit?
i dunno, i liked the old one that had the frequently visited sites list in it. the new one that insists on showing me some article i read and then finished confuses me tho.
Also they promised to open source Pocket in 2017, but seem to have zero intention of doing it.
Instead, they prioritize controversial integration into the browser itself.
>Also they promised to open source Pocket in 2017, but seem to have zero intention of doing it.
Zero intention of doing so or just have yet to do so? Did they say they were no longer considering the option?
It's been 2 years. They have no specific plans to release the server code.[1] They won't say what's been done or has to be done.
[1] https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75
On a software product note, "Pocket", the client-side product that does local-only interest analysis so it can get a full list of interesting articles from the server, and then locally filter out all the stuff you probably don't care about, is not "the server application that accepts volutary user submission analysis to determine what goes on the API response list with which categories".
No one ever talked about open sourcing the service that the pocket client relies on, as far as I can remember.
The main function of Pocket is saving pages to read later. Did Pocket even have client side recommendations when Mozilla acquired it?
Mozilla's claimed principles include privacy, interoperability, and free and open source software.[1]
1. Is it possible to use the open source Pocket client built into Firefox with any other server, e.g. by specifying another domain name in about:config?
2. Is there an open source implementation of compatible server software, that you could use to run your own server?
The answers to these questions will tell you whether Pocket is open source.
I had enough to wait for Pocket to be released in open source.
What the hell is "the best of Pocket's content"? I switched to FireFox to avoid stuff like this.
It's a bit annoying if you don't need it, but can be hidden/disabled.
It's a low impact way to support Firefox.
Mozilla / Firefox owns Pocket.
You are literally correct, but that doesn't answer the question at all.
Yeah, doing that last mile in your head is left as an excersise to the reader.
Question is: why is it still 'marketed' seperately?
It still has extensions and apps for every major browser and platform. They want more people to use it and buy premium subscriptions to support Mozilla and make them less dependent on search engine revenue.
Say what you will about Firefox, but they do make it super easy to disable this nonsense.
- Options -> Home -> Firefox Home Content -> Uncheck everything
I personally leave "Web Search" enabled, which gives a Chrome-like/minimalist experience.
Good advice. I just figured this out on my own, and thought it was reasonably easy enough. (You can also fiddle in about:config or click on the hamburger menu in about:home)
Switch to a privacy-friendly search engine like DuckDuckGo while you're at it.
Even on Android, I was confused by a list of spam "news" on the home page in Firefox 68.0.2.
To disable it: Settings, General, Home, Top Sites, disable "Recommended by Pocket".
Oh my god they are still going with this Pocket thing. Firefox is a perfect example of the paradox of plenty.
about:config; search pocket; delete api keys, disable stuff, be happy
Thanks for the tip!
Curious over what it does. This seems to be the meta bug tracking this : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1535711 . There are lot of linked issues and there is no clear description over this behavior. Can someone add in a link?
Someone teach Mozilla how to file a proper bug report.
It's completely optional.
I've had this for a long time, so I don't know why it's being presented as a new option.
I do think Mozilla managed the Pocket acquisition poorly (relative to the standards I would expect Mozilla to hold itself to...other companies do far worse without being criticized, but that's irrelevant...I used Firefox when it sucked because of the greater trust I placed in Mozilla) but since then they've done a decent job, considering it's their version of the read it later features every other browser has.
the new tab page is the first thing i replace after installing ublock origin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/yet-another-s...
You can achieve the same effect without installing any addon. Visit about:preferences#home
Uncheck everything except Top sites.
the speed dial extension can do screenshots for thumbnails. and if you care about aesthetics at all it looks much nicer :)
disable in about:config:
extensions.pocket.enabled -> false
> With the deprecation of Adobe Flash Player, there is no longer a need to identify users on 32-bit version of the Firefox browser on 64-bit version operating systems[, ]reducing user agent fingerprinting factors.
Good. User agents already contain too much.
That's actually the first time I've ever seen a browser actively removing stuff from the User Agent.
I believe Safari stopped increasing the browser version in the user agent some time ago.
So what does it do now? Is it just an older version number or did they remove the number altogether.
> Firefox no longer loads userChrome.css or userContent.css by default improving start-up performance. Users who wish to customize Firefox by using these files can set the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets preference to true to restore this ability.
How much of a performance improvement does this make?
I use userChrome.css and userContent.css, and I get the nagging feeling that the silent end of that sentence is "...when we eventually replace the code that currently enables user customization with faster, less flexible APIs."
(I'm paranoid and FUDing because I care: there's some UX low hanging fruit before they could get rid of userChrome.css. For instance, you need userChrome.css to autohide the toolbar in full screen mode on macOS — that's not even a customization, it's a missing feature.)
I mean, how slow could an "if file_exists()" check have been? This smells like deprecation to me, if the user CSS doesn't exist, don't load anything. Boom, no slowdown.
The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on an SSD". That's not great, actually, if you're trying to shave tens of milliseconds at a time off startup performance.
For what it's worth, this change happened because people were seeing the stat() call involved in startup profiles, taking sufficient time that it seemed worthwhile to avoid it if possible, as far as I can tell.
>The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on an SSD
C'mon the directory structure would be cached already, even if it was not - the seek times for HDD are 3-4ms.
The directory structure may or may not be cached already: these files are in a separate directory from everything else Firefox needs at startup.
If your HDD has a seek time of 3-4ms on average, that means it needs to rotate completely in at most 6-8ms, which gives you a rotation speed of 7500-10,000 rpm. HDDs in data centers do that, sure. Consumer HDDs just don't do that, last I checked; they're mostly in the 5400-7200 rpm range, with laptops firmly in the 5400 bucket. See https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sc/laptops?appl... for example (currently offered Dell laptops "for home" with an HDD: they're all 5400rpm). At 5400 rpm, your average latency from just the rotation is 5.5ms and your worst-case latency from the rotation is 11ms. That doesn't include other latency sources, but let's assume those are somehow scheduled away to happen during the rotation.
Keep in mind that what typically sticks in users' minds is worst-case, not average-case, behavior, so you have to bring your worst-case time budget down to whatever your target is.
I will comment on the paragraph and the way directories are stored in b-trees, being a separate directiry doesn't have a lot if bearing unless talking about FAT.
Are many users on HDDs these days? Weird that it would take this long, although I guess it's niche enough that you'd want to save those 20 ms for something used by a tiny fraction of users.
> Are many users on HDDs these days?
Yes, there are. They are not a niche cohort.
EDIT: In fact, we have many more users with magnetic HDDs than who use userChrome.css. That tells you everything you need to know about this decision right there.
Just under half of desktops use magnetic drives, according to Western Digital. [1]
Given that the profile setting is under a subsection of "legacyUserProfileCustomizations", perhaps there's a whole legacy subsystem they spin up to handle it that's only needed for that now? I could see a whole subsystem causing significant enough delay and resource usage to be noticeable, if that's the case.
AFAICT it's Firefox's CSS+HTML engine running the user chrome. You can even open the firefox web inspector on it (open web inspector -> settings -> enable browser chrome and add-on debugging toolboxes) which lets you fiddle with the chrome DOM and modify CSS that way.
Unfortunately, I think you're right. Mozilla has been fighting a slow war on all powerful UI customization. See: the recent killing of Tridactyl.
Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated :)
You can still install Tridactyl in a normal installation of Firefox by following the instructions on our readme [1]. Admittedly, that may cease to be the case if Mozilla ever tire of us; people in locked-down corporate environments would then find it hard or impossible to install Tridactyl but we'd make it as easy as possible for everyone else.
On topic, I'd argue that Mozilla are just desperately trying to cling on to ordinary users; the "war" against power users is a war of (totally understandable) neglect rather than spite.
[1]: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/master/readme.md
Firefox gained the marketshare it did because power users relentlessly evangelized it to non-power users.
There was some of the same phenomenon with Google, but the real difference is that Google pushed Chrome very strongly on the biggest web properties in the world, had it packaged in some other software installers, and advertised it. That's why Chrome has the market-share it does today.
Mozilla appears to now be courting the ordinary user market without having either the passion of power users driving it, or the world's biggest web properties shilling it.
To this day, visiting google.com (#1 website) in my default browser pops up a large notification informing me I need to switch to Chrome to 'hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web.' Visting YouTube.com (#2 website) pops up a slightly less annoying notification on the bottom that says "Google recommends using Chrome, a fast and secure browser."
I haven't been able to figure out for years now how they think this is going to work. Ordinary users are going to do what their IT administrator/IT friend says, use the OS default, or use products recommended by massive marketing campaigns.
This is it, exactly. No browser has ever gotten a dominant market share by convincing user Joe Average that it was better for their needs. That is an approach that is doomed to fail.
Just about every person I know that uses or used to use Firefox does so because I told them to use it or (more likely) I installed it for them. That's how most people start using Firefox.
I know Tridactyl is still installable, but the situation is not exactly reassuring about the viability of the extension in the future. Instead of a future in which Tridactyl asymptotically approaches the smoothness of Pentadactyl/Vimperator, I now have a vision of a future where a moderate-to-high amount of work has to be periodically invested in order to perhaps maintain the same level of functionality.
> On topic, I'd argue that Mozilla are just desperately trying to cling on to ordinary users; the "war" against power users is a war of (totally understandable) neglect rather than spite.
Perhaps, but meanwhile, as we muse about Tridactyl and the abandonment of userChrome and userContent, a thread about the possibility of Firefox removing webRequest in the future rises to #2. It's getting harder to justify Firefox and Mozilla by the moment.
> How much of a performance improvement does this make?
For a user with an SSD, perhaps not much. But there are still a lot of users out there with magnetic hard drives. Firefox has to do a decent amount of I/O at startup, and unneeded disk seeks add up for these users.
In addition, Firefox formerly checked for these files on the main thread, which is especially bad for performance. (Firefox engineer Mike Conley wrote about this at length at https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2019/05/16/a-few-words-on-main-th...)
If you read through the related bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541233), you can see that folks went to some trouble to keep anything from breaking for people using these files today. The claims that this is a step toward removing the files completely is FUD.
My unscientific feeling as an outside observer is that there's a pretty common pattern in the browsers of making a feature harder to access, leading to less use of the feature, and then removing the feature when the telemetry data shows there are few users.
I don't know if it's a purposeful process or not, but I'd say it's perfectly reasonable for users to think that pref-gating is the first step toward removal. The long road to RSS being completely removed from the browsers started with "just" taking it away from the defaults.
I mean that's exactly how Firefox operates. They divide the opposition to feature removals by continually allowing the most vocal critics a workaround, until finally when it's removed completely most people have already learned to live without them.
They moved the option to keep browsing history but not keep download history to a user-pref, and then later removed it.
They moved the option for tabs-on-bottom to a user-pref, and then later removed it.
They moved the disable-automatic-updates to a user-pref, and then later buried it in an external policy JSON, which I guess it's okay to see if that file exists at startup but not the user*.css files.
And on and on.
There's a very good point here about the limits of using usage telemetry -- given a question of the form "should we invest in improving feature X?", it's a mistake to decide not to simply on the basis of low usage. Low usage could be because users simply aren't interested in the feature (in which case it probably doesn't make sense to invest in improving it), or it could be that they really are interested in it but they don't use it because of limitations (in which case it may well make sense to invest in improving it).
However, I don't believe that's an issue for the specific features discussed here (userChrome.css and userContent.css). These are by their nature features that are only accessible to users with particular knowledge/skills and the Firefox user base is much broader than web developers. But moreover, nobody is proposing to remove this capability and I think its debatable whether it is now harder to access in practice (existing profiles that use this capability were automatically converted, for new profiles you already have to manually add a file to the profile directory, flipping a preference in addition is not a serious barrier).
> I don't know if it's a purposeful process or not, but I'd say it's perfectly reasonable for users to think that pref-gating is the first step toward removal
It might be reasonable if no other reason was given, but there is a specific and compelling reason (avoiding unneeded main thread I/O during startup for something like 99% of users) here.
I also think this is a pretty reasonable change, since it already requires users to edit files, so about:config is not really a major additional step.
But I also would imagine the usage was quite low already and any incremental hassle will push it lower and it won't be hard to get to an analysis where maintaining a rarely-used non-default codepath is seen as not worth it. Of course it all depends on what's going on with the specific code at issue, but the basic point of my post is that "nobody is proposing to remove this capability" is true, until it isn't.
This isn't a feature I actually use, but I also find the removal of a minuscule startup delay of a program I don't actually start very often to be a pretty marginal improvement, so I don't really have skin in the game in either direction.
I use the feature, but only because an extension I used before, ClassicThemeRestorer, isn't supported in the new extension ecosystem. The only workaround is to use the css files. I would imagine a large percent of people that used to use the extension didn't migrate to the css files when extensions broke. So they wouldn't be counted in metrics. Also the experience is much worse for an end user since extensions auto update, but changes to the css files have to be manually updated.
Last time I tried, I just couldn’t get userContent.css to work at all. Maybe a user error, but I’d really like an easy way to set some default styles to override the inane Web 0.5 era defaults such as zero margins and unlimited-width paragraphs. Reading Good Old HTML (tm) pages sucks, and although there’s the reading mode, it tends to simply drop vital content it doesn’t happen to support…
I've used https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx ever since ClassicThemeRestorer broke when they killed the old extensions. It seems to work fine for me.
Virtually they removed it in 68 with setting the flag when any of the files was present.
Unfortunately they also changed the css model, so even with the flag on - userChrome.css has become useless (to me)... I guess 66 will not be seeing an upgrade for the time being.
As for the question - should be less than 1ms (depends on the OS/filesystem obviously but still negligible)
It's just a lame excuse really, such a change not improve performance in any noticeable way.
I fear the change is just to take away this important customization option in the future and I don't like it.
by itself it won't, but they've been working on various optimizations to shorten startup time.
A few ms isn't much by itself, but when you add up a bunch of small optimizations like this one, it can add up to be a significant improvement.
Here's the bug about making it dependent on a pref: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541233
Even just checking for the existence of a file can take a really long time depending on the disk speed and other on going IO.
Checking for the existence of the files could take time since they are in a different directory, but checking for the existence of the chrome directory (which doesn't seem to be used for anything else) should not require disk access since the directory contents are already cached due to accessing other files in that directory. One person mentioned checking for the directory in the bug report but the answer made it sound like they actually checked the speed of testing for the existence of the files in an empty directory rather than checking for the existence of the directory.
Oh man, I thought I was going crazy when Nightly refused to load my userContent.css a while back. I really need a better way to find these changes, and the settings to undo them. I almost left Firefox when they experimented with changing the tab switcher a while back -- I would have left had I not found the flag to turn it off.
Weird...
Why wouldn't they just load them asynchronously?
I read that custom CSS files are often used by disabled users, which makes it doubly odd that they would just disable it by default.
Holy shit, just why? It makes virtually no difference. Neither applying CSS (they already use a lot) nor loading a file take any time.
Yeah, sounds like a non-reason, my user CSS was like 5 lines.
I'll have to run an extension that will be injecting JS/CSS into every page, to get the same effect. That will likely be slower. Not a speed improvement exactly.
At least it's more powerful. I can replace any rule inside already loaded CSS. Useful to escape this braindead age of "font-size < 16px && font-weight < 400".
If you have a user CSS, the "keep it working" pref has already been set for you, as of Firefox 68. So everything will keep working as it has.
It has to have been showing up in profiles for them to bother, nobody would go out of their way to disable it otherwise. They added a pref to turn it back on and then disabled it instead of the easy thing (just removing it) which is some engineering effort plus testing effort to make sure the pref works right. Silly to do that for nothing.
Antivirus software does add a measurable delay to file operations sometimes, and each file is gonna be in its own sector so I could see them losing at least a few milliseconds there. Applying CSS does add overhead but the average user can't have that many rules in there so I suspect it's purely on the file i/o level.
Not just that, but in an earlier release code was shipped to set the pref for users who already had the file, so that anyone who already had one of these files would not observe any behavior regressions.
And yes, file I/O was the issue.
Yeah, I checked and it was automatically enabled for me, so no regression.
Thank you for doing this!
I can't claim credit for it; I hadn't even realized it had happened until I dug a little bit into the history while reading this thread. All I knew was that my userChrome.css was still working fine... ;)
> macOS users on dual-graphics-card machines (like MacBook Pro) will switch back to the low-power GPU more aggressively, saving battery life.
macOS user base can now consider FF as a viable browser alternative.
There are more macOS battery life improvements coming in Firefox 70 in around six weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255
For some measurements: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c45
I just got 70b3 via the beta channel and the difference is notable when using gmail and google drive. They load faster and there's a bit less latency when you click something in the UI. I can't tell you if this completely closes the gap as I don't really use other browsers. But it definitely improved a bit.
Two big changes related to performance: - the baseline javascript interpreter is now enabled (this is probably responsible for improving things for Google related stuff). - they optimized a few things with the compositor for mac to further reduce battery usage. I'm guessing this might include some of the work that has been done to port parts of the browser to rust.
Upcoming versions should at some point include the webrender changes that are currently available to some windows users already.
If you are wondering, the beta channel is generally rock solid for me. You end up restarting the browser a bit more often to get the latest beta and obviously they are still finding and fixing bugs. But I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me. I've been on the beta channel for close to two years. By the time features land to the beta channel, they've been on nightly for some time already. So, that generally means all the obvious stuff has been resolved already.
For me, not viable on macOS until they implement pinch to zoom.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990
Edit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-z... seems to help, though still not perfect.
Please be the case - this is reason #1 why I haven't switched.
I've been using nightly and developer edition. It's greatly improved. I still don't think it's as good as Safari, but it's at least as good as Chrome. I've gotten nearly 3 hours of battery life back from these improvements.
You could try Firefox Nightly to see it for yourself ;)
You don't need nightly. This is released already.
Nightly is supposed to be even better, and with further improvements in the pipeline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892
A significant number of changes are still pending the release of version 70.
My MBP doesn’t have a dedicated card and yet firefox manages to eat my battery as a snack
For me (MBP from early 2015 w/o dedicated card) the upcoming FF 70 made a huge difference. I installed the beta today and I finally can go to youtube, facebook and reddit (the new design!) without the fan spinning up.
Sounds like I'll give FF another try on the Mac. I do love it on Windows
I wonder if this will help address the system freezes I've been getting for the past month on my early 2011 MacBook Pro. The fix I was going to pursue makes an attempt to disable usage of the "bad" GPU: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2011-%E2%80%A2-15-17-in...
Most of my lock-ups seem to happen when I try to access specific sites using Firefox, especially financial sites.
On my 2018 Air, firefox runs a lot better if I put it into low res mode (macOS setting, not ffx setting). Downside is text looks pretty bad but somehow images/videos are fine and content is the same right so whatever.
This was the single thing I was hoping to see here. Upgrading now.
Firefox 70 will be the first version where enough of the changes that they have been working towards will land to yield really substantial power savings, with more changes yet to land beyond that.
The next version will drop OpenGL and use Core Animation instead.
I know a lot of people have become impatient, but they have been doing a huge amount of work behind the scenes.
Technically it'll still be using OpenGL, it'll just have system compositor integration via CoreAnimation for scrolling, and possibly some elements in the page like video.
Does anyone know the technical reason that the OS can't handle that itself?
Not using OSX, but I have some ideas.
An app tells an OS it gonna use OpenGL to 3D render stuff. Generally, the OS doesn’t know whether it’s a competitive 3D shooter where each FPS really matters, or a web browser which only uses OpenGL to render a few textured quads. If the OS will default to slower integrated GPU, users will be unhappy, they want 3D performance. So the OSes typically power up the faster GPU in such cases.
On dual-GPU Windows laptop, nVidia partially solves this in their drivers, they have very long list of process names saying which ones are games or other 3D intense apps.
It usually works but very far from being 100% reliable. It requires GPU drivers to be updated regularly. For cases when it fails even with latest drivers, they have multiple methods for user to select the GPU. They implemented context menu on .exe files “Run with graphic processor” with 2 further options, for nVidia and Intel GPUs. They implemented GUI for users to customize that apps list. They also implemented a proprietary API for programmers to customize that list in code, I’m using this method in the installer of a CAD/CAM app I’ve developed.
These things cause quite a lot of complexity, both software bloat, and UI clutter. Traditionally, Apple wants the GUI to be clean. AFAIK they don’t push driver updates, and they avoid UI clutter even if it means some power users won’t get some advanced settings they might like.
I guess I was thinking of this from a heterogeneous architecture standpoint (e.g. big.LITTLE) . You have differently-capable compute resources, and you need to pick the one thats best suited for the work-load. Rather than the app talking directly to the hardware, I suppose the OS should let the app pick its work-load type, similar to letting it choose a process scheduling priority.
Unlike ARM cores, GPU code is expensive to migrate between them. Two GPUs have different ISA, each GPU driver compiles platform-independent bytecode like DXBC or SPIR-V into proprietary instruction set. VRAM can contain many GB of data, when migrating, everything needs to be copied. The asymmetric ARM cores at least have same RAM, and very similar instruction set.
These issues make live migration impractical. AFAIK, modern OSes don’t do that, the GPU is fixed at the moment an app creates D3D or GL context.
Picking the best GPU for the job can be tricky. By the time the app creates a 3D rendering context, the OS has no idea what it’s going to render.
Write a code that renders something simple, then downloads the frame buffer from GPU back to system RAM — Intel will probably be faster, for nVidia that copy back is expensive because PCIx, for Intel very cheap, no PCIx IO, just memcpy.
Even exposing an OS API where apps can request high or lower power GPUs is still unreliable. An app which does very simple rendering can sometimes demand way more resources, connect a 5k monitor and simple rendering can become too expensive for intel due to count of pixels. A game which reports it needs a lot of GPU power will be very light workload in 10 years from release, perfectly suitable for low-power integrated GPUs.
When switching from onboard -> dedicated, the resources (textures, shaders, etc) to migrate will be quite small. There is no question of migrating resources from dedicated -> onboard as that is never going to happen, unless .. again the resources are tiny. The context switch performance hit will depend on the other components on the board, but for a high end CPU/RAM/SSD combo, it wont be much. It will be equal to re-loading the all the browser tabs (for e.g. after a browser crashes).
>they have very long list of process names saying which ones are games or other 3D intense apps.
Is it possible to submit application names for this? This issue frequently comes up with our free simulator/game.
I have no idea whether nVidia willing to change that list for small software publishers. Technically, I know 2 workarounds.
1. If your app’s main .exe is written in C, C++ or something similar, you can change the default by DLL exporting a DWORD variable from your exe. For more info, search the web for `NvOptimusEnablement`.
2. If you can’t export variables from your .exe, you can do what I did: make an installer, write a custom installer action in C (technically they’re just DLLs), in that custom action consume NVApi and create a new profile for the main executable of your software. For more info, read this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40915100
Update: you can also detect dual-GPU system and use NVApi from your app, but it has 2 disadvantages. Slightly increases startup time. Also the new settings will only be applied next time user launches the app, you’ll need to communicate it that with your user, with a message like “please restart the game for better 3D performance”.
It tries based on the libraries you’re using. Sounds like they’ve improved what they’re using so the built in heuristics don’t force the dedicated GPU on.
Can someone clarify for me what "Enhanced Tracking Protection" covers? The text on Mozilla's pages is a bit fluff, I'm interested in the mechanics of it.
I've been out of ad-tech for about 5 years, but when I was working in that industry it was common to drop evil cookie pixels everywhere in the page and then do cookie-matching with them ("my cookie for this user is X, do we per-chance have a match with something you have?")
Will this effectively end that by preventing cookies from domains that aren't the domain of the site itself?
I hope so.
From here [1]:
For new users who install and download Firefox for the first time, Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be set on by default as part of the ‘Standard’ setting in the browser and will block known “third-party tracking cookies” according to the Disconnect list. We talk more about tracking cookies here. Enhanced Tracking Protection will be practically invisible to you and you’ll only notice that it’s operating when you visit a site and see a shield icon in the address bar next to the URL address and the small “i” icon. When you see the shield icon, you should feel safe that Firefox is blocking thousands of companies from your online activity.
A better source is probably the disconnect site [2]:
> Tracking is the collection of data regarding a particular user's activity across multiple websites or applications that aren’t owned by the data collector, and the retention, use or sharing of that data.
> Our definition focuses on collection AND retention. So, for example, the definition wouldn’t apply to sites that log an IP address, but don’t save that information in a database. The definition also focuses on particular users, so data that is immediately aggregated doesn’t apply. And the collection is across context, so it doesn’t apply in cases when there is solely a first-party relationship with the user, for example the site only collects and retains information on site visitors.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
This isn't really explaining the "how" to me though.
The way I remember it is, as the page host I have a cookie on you. Then I drop in a 1-pixel image to a third party, and in the query string to it I write in a hashed form of the cookie I have for you. That HTTP request then itself can go through the cookie process, but for the third party. They then check their DB for both their own issued cookie and the value you passed in, and are then able to perform some asynchronous (batch or otherwise) match to associate the two IDs. From then on, an ad etc. can be targeted based on that info.
Yeah, it doesn't seem that merely blocking third party cookies can address a scenario like this, where the main site colludes with the third party tracking site.
To avoid this, it still seems like the best approach is to use an ad blocker add-on like uBlock Origin, which will block any content from known tracking domains from being loaded. That should get rid of the third party image.
There's also uMatrix (from the maker of uBlock Origin), which can selectively block images, scripts, etc. from third party sites.
Typically, the way these things work is that third party cookies are set with short lifetimes and first party cookies are set with long lifetimes. In other words, this doesn't prevent Facebook from tracking you with its Like buttons if you visit facebook.com as well, but it does prevent the DSPs and data brokers who don't have first party destination sites from tracking you across their clients. Ultimately, this will consolidate ad spend into Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
To add, big players have been moving to server side tracking for some time now. Cookies are fragile.
I've been using the Firefox 69 beta since it came out, and with auto-playing audio and video set to blocked, some sites still somehow manage to auto-start muted videos. Is this a bug I should report, or is there some exception that websites are taking advantage of (like starting the video via an event handler like onscroll)?
If you know of specific sites that sidestep auto-play blocking, that would be worth reporting. I think I saw similar behavior on the Yahoo News site.
I think Yahoo News was loading new article content into the same page (like Turbolinks does) instead of navigating to a new page. Clicking links becomes the user action that allows video playback for the current page and that permission is retained across articles because the browser is not navigating away to new pages. Just a theory...
Yes, it’s probably a bug you should report.
I had to set this value in about:config media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed;false
Now, no video auto-plays when I interact on the page.
maybe it should be blocked by default, then one can "whitelist" domain.
My fingers are itching to ban some sites... such as cnn.com, dailymailco.uk
dailymail.co.uk is already banned in my house for other reasons.
Why?
> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound.
Does this also block GIFs from auto-playing? Blocking no-sound videos from auto-playing will keep GIFs alive for another decade.
not having a real alternative to GIFs will keep them alive for another decade. By real alternative I mean: behaves like an image, you drag'n'drop like an image, on your desktop shows the thumbnail of an image and when you open, doesn't open the video player, play just once and stops.
Enhanced Tracking Protection feature is enabled by default in this release.
The font rendering on the mozilla website is absolutely horrific (Firefox 68/Windows 7): https://i.imgur.com/JMpq9Xe.png
These settings (in about:config) makes font rendering look near identical to Chrome for me:
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.enhanced_contrast = 0 gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode = 5 gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families = ""There has to be some reason why those are not the defaults though, right?
My understanding is that Chrome is the outlier when it comes to font rendering.
but still is what most people are used to... so in a sense, chrome is the default
That won't be a concern in 5 months ;)
What happens in 5 months?
Windows 7 support ends on Jan 14, 2020.
Windows 7 goes EOL maybe?
>Finder on macOS now displays download progress for files being downloaded
It's the little things that are making me go back to Firefox more-and-more
Hope this release somehow magically fixes an ongoing issue in Windows 10 I've had with Firefox.
The gist of it is that Firefox, and only Firefox, will cause my Windows 10 system to completely hard freeze (no mouse movement, no response period) for about 30-60 seconds at a time, multiple times daily. It's so frustrating that it makes FF unusable for me.
It's odd because it seems to be a rare issue that has to do with it not letting go of a GPU handle/process/thread or something, from what I've been able to deduce from others having this issue that have posted bugs in the tracker. I've tried everything under the sun to fix it, but no other program, period has this problem. I game, I use other browsers, I do all sorts of stuff on this PC with zero issues, but Firefox gives me these temporary hard-freezes. Ugh.
> only Firefox will cause my Windows 10 system to completely hard freeze
Whenever I experience this type of thing I can't help but speculate that issues like this are not serendipity at work.
I recollect reading an article years back from a Microsoft developer who spoke about how it was quite common for Windows code to take specific actions based on which app was running - ostensibly to 'improve the user experience'. Though, it's not hard to imagine MS using this for the opposite purpose. And, since their code is proprietary, who would know?
Seems somewhat unlikely in this instance, because apparently the issue I'm running into is pretty rare. There are millions of people using FF on W10 daily without any issues. Heck, even I have other W10 machines where it doesn't happen.
> For our users on Windows 10, you’ll see performance and UI improvements:
> For our existing Windows 10 users, you can easily find and launch Firefox from a shortcut on the Win10 taskbar.
???
As opposed to before?!
I suspect that is their way of telling us that the installer now adds a taskbar shortcut.
The good: ETP by default, battery life improvements, flash deprecation (finally!), about:debugging, event breakppints (finally! #2)
The bad: userChrome/userContent not being loaded by default, I don't understand why it would cause a delay at startup.
The ugly: More Pocket crap.
Note, this version disables userChrome.css in new profiles. If you need it, enable it in about:config:
toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true
Just out of interest, how many people run the "release" version of Firefox?
I'm currently using Firefox Developer on the latest auroua update channel version ( 70.0b3 ).
I haven't really expereienced any problems and am only vaugely aware of new things from time to time. Actually mostly I'm not sure if I'm noticing something new or something that's existed for a long time. Like for instance the other day I put in an address in the address bar and it gave me a "switch to tab" option because I already had that open in a browser window, I swear that's new, but I'm not sure!
I have been using Firefox Developer for about 6 months, but after two incidents of week-long bugs that caused my browser to crash after a variable number of minutes, no matter what I had open, I've decided to swap back to the release version.
Yeah, you get a few cool features a bit early, but I just can't stand the instability anymore. Pluis, I'm not actually using any of the "Developer" features, so there's really no reason for me to not just run release.
> The network panel will now show blocked resources
Good! I remember losing quite some time before I realised something wasn't in the network tab because it never fired rather than failing to be triggered by the application code.
The privacy aspect of Firefox is great. The containers also a great thing and help us to a great extend. Beyond the privacy aspects, I really wish if Firefox pays attention to little things that can make the life of a user a bit better.
- The Firefox sign in process is considerably improved, with a link based sign in with email. The fact is that you will not be singed in to email on the first time usage. So you are behind a wall to start browsing and the cognitive load not to leave the tab before completing setup. This experience with Google Chrome is far far better, as it’s one time setup using your Google Account . Even if you discount the google’s ownership and single account sign in, there are considerable improvements to be made in the onboarding process
- The Pocket integration is substandard to the Pocket extension.
- The Top sites and highlights are too big for my aesthetics. It could be little cuter in the way it appears.
- Moving a video to full screen makes your blank for a second and not a smooth transition as in Chrome or Safari
- Lack of certain platform specific integrations such as Look Up on macOS to get the dictionary triggered by selected word. It works across all the other browsers well. On Firefox, I need to make a google search.
- The tab bar is ugly and has lot of blank spaces
- No default support for dark mode which works beautifully well on Chrome and Safari in a very early stage. More than a feature, the slowness in picking up platform specific features.
- The containers concept is really great but not for most of the general users to make use of it. It’s still a bit geeky in nature.
- I’ve to go with standard privacy settings to make my sites work including google. Making the privacy settings strong doesn’t help much and get signed out of the sessions very frequently. - I use an app called Magnet on Mac to snap my windows easily by dragging to corners. The snapping works great on all browsers by dragging a tab to one of the corners. But Firefox just releases the tab once it’s pulled out from the current window. We need to drag again this to the corners. More than a third-party workflow, it’s about how these windows are defined and behaves in a standard way
> - The containers concept is really great but not for most of the general users to make use of it. It’s still a bit geeky in nature.
This. Containers are quite complicated to reason about, require a fair amount of setup and do not sync. Not to mention the color pallete is bizarrely limited.
I use both Firefox and Chrome but use Chrome for work because Profiles are much easier to use. I just open another profile, which loads with a nice theme and a set of extensions (limiting my exposure to some extensions in other profiles).
Profiles are so simple and just work.
Firefox of course has profiles, but you cannot run two of them at the same time without using the command line (or creating shortcuts to launch multiple versions of the browser).
I have a bunch of Facebook domains in my hosts, but for some reason Firefox 69.0 gets DNS from somewhere else and goes right through. Weird. The other stuff in hosts resolves correctly.
It could be DNS over https, which Mozilla have been experimenting with.
It wasn't on by default, but yeah, once I turned it on, it entirely bypassed hosts for everything, not just Facebook owned domains.
Check that "network.trr.mode" is set to "0" in "about:config" to disable firefox using DNS over HTTPS (DoH). It was introduced in Firefox 62 I think.
You're better off setting it to "5". From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver :
"Set `network.trr.mode` to 2 to make DNS Over HTTPS the browser's first choice but use regular DNS as a fallback (0 is "off by default", 1 lets Firefox pick whichever is faster, 3 for TRR only mode, 5 to explicitly turn it off)."
Could you run `sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder` and try again? It's possible that the DNS is cached.
No luck. I thought maybe it was cached somehow because of the way Facebook is linked from the start page, but so is Reddit, and putting Reddit in the hosts worked. Strangely, the hosts file doesn't seem to be read with Instagram either. I'm not sure what's going on here.
Is DNS-over-HTTPS on by default now?
It is not, just checked my install
A nice feature that should be standard:
>> "The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound."
One time I hit a site with a huge anti-ad block message at the top that said I couldn't watch the video until I disabled my adblocker. But...I came for an article. The article wasn't obstructed. I assume the video was auto-playing. I decided to go back and try another result.
Honestly the big one for me is being able to finally debug async code, which Chrome has been able to do for a long time, and FF simply couldn't. As someone who uses FF as main browser, not being able to use to for modern code and being forced into using a different browser for proper debugging has been quite frustrating.
Thank you Mozillians!
seems it works much faster on sway + wayland + 4k display, but still slower than with XWayland
Still no mention of hardware-accelerated video on Linux. Can't consider Firefox until this is implemented, but it works on Chromium in multiple distros. Seems like Chromium folks are more apt to actually prioritize Linux over Mozilla.
Eh it works in Chromium with patches that Google won't upstream because there are a lot of configs it doesn't work on.
The biggest blocker for it in Firefox seems to be webrender landing in stable.
Nice.
How do you block cryptominers?
Install uBlock Origin and activate its "resource abuse" lists?
Nice
nice
nice
No way dude
Is rss still too hard for Firefox?
ANY news on the fact that FF makes my Mac sound like it's gonna take off?? I honestly can't understand how an issue so prevalent gets ignored for so long by them.
For those doubting, do a simple Google with "firefox cpu".
Not happening with mine.
Wait, Firefox Monitor? As in "allow us to store your email and password in case your email and password are pwned in some other site"? Does anyone else think this is prone to disaster, eventually?
They only store an email address and let you know if that email address ever appears in a breach. They don't know your password, they're not asking for your password, and they're not interested in your password.
Also, knowing your password wouldn't be enough to identify it within a breach, assuming that the breached website does the bare minimum to store them safely (as in, uses a salt).
How about reading a thing or two before jumping to conclusions?
It utilises K-anonymity, making it difficult if not impossible for this to become a massive data leak.
The email gets hashed on your device, and the start of that hash is sent off to the server. The server returns a list of all the hashes that might match. The client then checks that list for complete matches.
Sounds fairly reasonable. I was already getting afraid of my private email addresses being leaked via this check.
>How does Firefox Monitor know I was involved in these breaches?
>Firefox Monitor gets its data breach information from a publicly searchable source, Have I Been Pwned. If you don’t want your email address to show up in this database, visit the opt-out page.
Firefox monitor doesn't store your password. It simply checks your email address/addresses against known breaches.
Two things about that in reply to your comment:
1. Right now Firefox Monitor uses your Firefox account for signups. For somebody like me who already has a Firefox account, I don't see a net difference in risk here.
2. If you don't want to make one, then Monitor is transparent in that they just use https://haveibeenpwned.com under the hood (source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-monitor-faq#w_h...), which doesn't require anything more than submitting your email and passing their Google captcha. It's unfortunate that they're not more forthcoming about this, but the option is there.
Actually, today Firefox Monitor popped up and told me that a website I was using (Canva, I need it for work reasons) was recently hacked. My account was also compromised. Canva didn't even bother to inform me of the fact.
I think this is a great functionality and it will really help the average user.
It's more like "share your email and if it turns up in a leak we'll inform you."
Some password managers already do this and I personally think its a nice feature. Though I often generate new emails and passwords for sites on the spot so this feature isn't of much use to me.
This is Firefox frontend to HaveIBeenPwnd.
Pretty sure it's keyed on your email alone. Not sure where you saw anything about passwords.
Firefox Monitor does not do that. They store a hash of your email, and contacts Have I Been Pwned.