
Firefox 75: Ambitions for April - skellertor
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/04/firefox-75-ambitions-for-april/
======
clairity
firefox also removes 'www' and 'https' in _drop-down search results_ from the
address bar[0]. it's a subtle change, but worth knowing. 'http' urls remain in
long form apparently (haven't installed yet to check it out).

edit: min(), max(), and clamp() for css looks useful too.

edit 2: honoring 'nosniff' on mime types on page load is neat too [1]

[0] [https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/28/firefox-75-address-bar-
res...](https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/28/firefox-75-address-bar-results/)

[1]
[https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/04/07/firefox-75-will...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/04/07/firefox-75-will-
respect-nosniff-for-page-loads/)

~~~
chrismorgan
Fenix is also now stripping [https://](https://) and
[https://www](https://www). from the address bar, which I strongly approve of
as it has none of the downsides that doing that would have on desktop (OK, OK,
so www. stripping can be _theoretically_ significant), and I have a not-huge
device so that that was taking up around half of the space allotted to text.
Now if only I could do away with the padlock (only show it when it’s
problematic, not all the time) and shrink the remaining badge much smaller.
And/or if you could scroll the text horizontally like you could in Firefox for
Android.

~~~
oefrha
Except in Chrome, say I’m on
[https://www.google.com/chrome/](https://www.google.com/chrome/), which is
shown as google.com/chrome/. Now for one reason or another I want to copy only
part of the address, say only the domain name. So I grab “google.com” with my
mouse and command+c to copy it. Congratulations, I just copied
[https://www.google.com](https://www.google.com), although I explicitly
selected only the “google.com” part. I can understand the behavior if I was
copying the entire URL.

Now, I’m not sure how this is handled in the mobile Firefox Preview, but
thankfully on desktop they only dim [https://[www.]](https://\[www.\]).

(Btw, it seems a sibling somehow has the exact opposite gripe.)

~~~
jakear
> it seems a sibling somehow has the exact opposite gripe

If you don't have two users complaining about the exact same issue but in
opposite directions, your feedback channels aren't working. ;)

------
hising
"On Linux, the behavior when clicking on the Address Bar and the Search Bar
now matches other desktop platforms" \- yay, I have found it annoying that you
need to double-click in order to select all and start searching

~~~
the_pwner224
When this change was made in FF Nightly I was annoyed enough to find out why
it happened and file a bug report about the regression
([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619801](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619801),
and a dupe at
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570)),
but apparently it was an intended change. What's annoying is that instead of
just changing the default for Linux to be in line with other platforms, the
option to _not_ select the URL when clicking was completely removed.

Now I have to click on the URL, wait a second, and then click again to place
the cursor instead of selecting all. Especially annoying if you accidentally
move your mouse off by a character between the two clicks. This makes me quite
mad the few times per day I run into it - the feature is quite useful for
changing URLs, which it turns out I do quite often, even though I'm usually
not a web developer.

I'm currently compiling Firefox with the patch reverted. EDIT: It worked!!!
Compiling took about an hour with an AMD Ryzen 3800x (8x 3.9-4.5 GHz) and NVMe
SSD and 32 GB RAM. I'll post a link in a followup comment here with
instructions on the simplest way to do this on Arch Linux (uses the build
infrastructure already setup to create Arch's regular Firefox package, just
modified to also revert the patch which removed this preference). Of course
there's no guarantee that this will continue to work in the future as the FF
codebase is updated.

~~~
citruscomputing
If you just care about changing part of the URL, you can click and drag to
highlight and then type to replace.

~~~
the_pwner224
Dang, I never thought of that. Thanks!

Still doesn't help for adding something onto the end, but good enough for 90%
of cases.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Still doesn't help for adding something onto the end

If I'm going to need to type anyway, I'd rather do that with the keyboard than
the mouse: Ctrl-L End /xyz or Ctrl-L Right /xyz feels much faster to me than
"move mouse to end of address bar, click, /xyz".

(I absolutely understand that relearning/retaining muscle memory takes time
and feels frustrating, though.)

~~~
tvb12
I do the same thing, but with Alt-D. I thought it was strange that there are
duplicate hotkeys for the function, but looking at the shortcuts page shows
that's not uncommon. It seems F6 does the same thing, but I can't remember the
last time I used an F-key.

------
ned_roberts
A big one for me (covered in the release notes):

"Experimental support for using client certificates from the OS certificate
store can be enabled on macOS by setting the preference
security.osclientcerts.autoload to true."

This allows Firefox to work with my company's BeyondCorp implementation. I was
forced to use Chrome before.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Could you not just copy the cert from keychain to firefox’s cert store?

~~~
nbadg
Not necessarily; it's possible for the certs to be copy protected.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
No it isn’t.

------
owenshen24
Built-in support for lazy image loading is pretty nice! No more annoying JS-
based hacks to get it to work.

~~~
AnonC
Do all the other popular browsers, like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (the new
one) and Brave, also support this?

~~~
hundchenkatze
It looks like the Blink based browsers do. [https://caniuse.com/#feat=loading-
lazy-attr](https://caniuse.com/#feat=loading-lazy-attr)

------
butz
And there are some minimal improvements to "Install Website as App": now app
is not grouped with Firefox icon on Windows, displays correct icon. Little
steps towards full PWA support.

------
sandov
Just got the update on Ubuntu.

The address bar looks horrible when selected [0], it outgrows its container
and invades the space of tabs. I thought it was a bug at first, but it's
probably intentional. is there a way to go back to the normal address bar?

[0] [https://imagehost.imageupload.net/2020/04/08/Screenshot-
from...](https://imagehost.imageupload.net/2020/04/08/Screenshot-
from-2020-04-07-19-21-34.png)

~~~
Tagbert
It is similar on Mac OS. Seems like a reasonable method to shift focus.
Doesn’t break things but it different so might need a little settle time to
get used to.

------
AndrewStephens
Two things I am looking forward to:

* Lazy loading images without JavaScript

* Static fields in JavaScript classes - I wanted to use this the other day and was disappointed that FF didn't support static fields yet.

------
Scottn1
Wait, Am I the only one to notice right away that FF FINALLY added a "Default
Zoom" option to its settings? Or has this been there before recently and I've
missed it? If this is new then THANKS 1000x.

For YEARS this was my main annoyance with FF of not having a general zoom
added to all webpages and was the only browser that didn't. FF would remember
your set zoom for sites (provided you didn't check "site preferences" in
clearing history) but it just became so tedious to have to manually zoom pages
you haven't visited before.I even tried to resort to some clumsy add-ons that
tried to makeup for lack of system wide zoom

{FF as default browser user since Opera died and went to being chrome.
Although I do test others out once in while like Brave/Vivaldi/EdgeChrome I'm
still loyal}

~~~
sfink
No, you weren't really missing anything, default zoom is very recent. I don't
remember which version it was, but it was within the last 3. It's a big deal
for accessibility.

------
WhyNotHugo
There's no mention of any of the promised Wayland improvements (which I'd been
looking forward to).

It's a bit unclear if it hasn't made it to the final release, or if it's just
a matter of the Linux userbase being too small for them to announce Linux-
specific changes.

~~~
yaantc
According to Phoronix it's in:
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-75-Released)

~~~
oshanz
plan to be on ff 76
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-76-VA-
API-Formats)

------
amadeusz
So... anyone knows how to restore old address bar look, instead of this weird
popup thingy?

~~~
gravitas
Searched for this myself this morning, about:config and search
"urlbar.update1". Set it to False and completely restart FF.

~~~
amadeusz
Great! Thank you!

------
rozhok
XPath search is a good one. I've used to scrape some data from the sites and
missing search by XPath forced me to use chromium derivatives. Great to see
this feature coming.

------
weystrom
Hardware video accelleration on Linux with Wayland! I've tested it on Youtube,
it works alright, definitely less CPU usage, however on twitch.tv I still get
some graphical glitches.

------
butz
How do I change search engine from search bar? Before update there were icons
with my saved search engines, but now they are nowhere to be seen.

~~~
mythmon_
Once you start typing the same icons should show up again. You can click on
them to perform just that search with the selected search engine, or right
click on it to make it the default.

~~~
edflsafoiewq
I hate this kind of UI.

The very worst I've seen is in Krita (maybe they've changed it) where to make
a new brush you had to select the name field of an existing brush and edit it,
and only _then_ would the button for "Save a Copy as a New Brush" or whatever
appear. Good luck hunting for the "New Brush" button, you're not going to find
it.

------
gshdg
Will lazy-loading images avoid viewport jumping? Because that's a constant
headache on mobile Safari.

~~~
butz
Now it is recommended to use width and height attributes on img elements. It
will help to prevent viewport jumping and will support responsive aspect ratio
resizing.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-d_SoCHeWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-d_SoCHeWE)

~~~
gshdg
That's been recommended since about 1993. That doesn't mean more than 10% of
sites have ever actually followed the guideline.

~~~
bfred_it
WordPress does this by default and that’s the most common platform to date.
I’d dare to say that most websites have those attributes, but most SPAs don’t,
because _that’s too hard._

------
itwy
They should fix looking up for things such as "clipboard.js" attempting to
look up the domain and giving not found page. Chrome is smarter in this
regard.

~~~
aswan
Its being worked on:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1080682](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1080682)

~~~
itwy
Opened 6 years ago!

~~~
rrll22
Progress:
[https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D68796#2134810](https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D68796#2134810)

------
ravenstine
It would be great if the inspector supported dark mode.

~~~
recursive
It has for a while. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Tools/Settings](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Tools/Settings)

~~~
jamesgeck0
Kinda. It has a dark mode, but it doesn't seem to pick up the system
preference.

~~~
recursive
That is one way to look at it. Personally, I don't regularly use any operating
system that has such a preference. To me, FF supports dark mode, although not
certain operating systems' implementations.

~~~
jamesgeck0
That preference exists on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, so it's not an
unusual expectation for users to have. Supporting system dark mode means that
you can do things like have all applications automatically switch themes based
on the time of day.

Revising my opinion; Firefox dev tools has a dark theme, but it doesn't
support dark mode.

------
agumonkey
ah live console eval as comment, such a bliss

------
tictok4
Hopefully this fixes Firefox 74. First time in years I can say that I've had
stability problems, frequent crashes, etc.

~~~
rvz
I definitely agree if you compare it to MS Edge. However, it appears you are
being downvoted for disagreeing with the Mozillian crowd in this thread by
critiquing their beloved Firefox which is somewhat seen as treasonous.

Try to play nice with the Mozillians here by praising their saviour Rust on
each Firefox release since they will hunt us down if we complain about
crashes, unsafety or any other bugs in Linux.

I'll go first: 𝔓𝔯𝔞𝔦𝔰𝔢 ℜ𝔳𝔰𝔱 MMXX

------
hartator
> evnt breakpoints

Typo in the first paragraph.

------
franczesko
World runs on mobile, Mozilla focuses of desktop.

~~~
sudosysgen
Firefox Mobile also has a _lot_ of improvements coming up. The previews are
actually quite amazing

------
benbristow
Nice to see Mozilla keeping up. Don't really have much reason personally to
use Firefox nowadays though due to the new Microsoft Edge being so good.

~~~
rvz
I have to agree here. If VSCode seems to be a widely accepted editor on HN
using Electron, then I can't wait to see what Microsoft has done with MS Edge
which so far is a breath of fresh air.

Time to go where the 'real' users are.

