
Firefox 73 - i_am_not_elon
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/02/firefox-73-is-upon-us/
======
dmitryminkovsky
I switched to Firefox this month. Had to, with everything that's going on in
Chrome. After struggling to remember to use Firefox, I just signed out of all
my accounts in Chrome. Now I reach for Firefox much more naturally. Soon
enough it should take.

Great to see the emphasis on DevTools in this release. DevTools have
definitely much improved since I last tried, but they are still glitchy
compared to Chrome. For example, I was using the JS debugger, and for some
reason breakpoints wouldn't "hold"—after being stopped for some period of time
(not long), the page would refresh. Also little things like
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613957](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613957),
which I was able to report. It was frustrating. Had to go back to Chrome for
development. Still, it was nice to see many features that Chrome doesn't have,
like breakpoint logging, which is nice when you want to insert a log into
third party code.

And as a browser from a non-dev perspective, it's great. Great to know this
browser is all about privacy instead of just trying to provide the bare
minimum to keep people on board. Great to have the Facebook Container.

Thank you Firefox!

~~~
im3w1l
Everything that's going on?

~~~
kaibee
[https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-ad-blockers-
extens...](https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-ad-blockers-extensions-
api/)

------
newscracker
One more Firefox release, one more long list of people on HN who:

* have switched from Chrome because <...> reasons why Chrome is worse or has become worse

* have always used Firefox and never left it

* have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>

What I, as a long time Firefox user and evangelist, would like to know is how
we can have Firefox thrive and grow, what Mozilla Corporation is doing (or not
doing) to get more funding for Firefox, and why we aren't seeing all those
services that they wanted to sell to generate revenue. The Firefox team has
reduced in size recently, and more money might probably help avoid such
situations (or postpone them).

P.S.: Donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation, which is the non-
profit parent of Mozilla Corporation (the maker of Firefox). I do not know of
any direct way for end users/supporters to fund Firefox development.

~~~
ip26
_how we can have Firefox thrive and grow_

Not that anyone is asking me, but I think the mobile browser is a limiter. No
matter how much I like a given desktop browser, I like bookmark & password
syncing more. Unfortunately for me I find the Firefox desktop browser is first
class, but the mobile browser is not. As a result it's almost immediately
ruled out.

I've never seen anyone else mention this so I might be a tiny minority.

~~~
Miraste
You're not alone, Firefox mobile is practically unusable. But! For a while
now, Mozilla has been putting all their development effort into Fenix (Firefox
Preview on the Play Store), which has all the speed and responsiveness main
Firefox doesn't, plus a better UI and general slickness. It even has limited
extension support in the alpha, which should make it to the release version
very soon. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for a few months now
and it's great. There are still occasional bugs, but it's finally a legitimate
Chrome alternative.

~~~
noisem4ker
>Firefox mobile is practically unusable.

I vehemently disagree. With support for add-ons including uBlock Origin, it's
one of the very few usable browsers on mobile.

~~~
Miraste
I was using Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin, and I found that Chrome with no
adblocking was a better experience. Page loads, scrolling, zooming, and the
other interactions were so slow they counteracted the advantage.

That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has
uBlock support. Best of both worlds.

~~~
mtrower
Slow? I don't find it slow at all, and my phone isn't exactly top-end; what
kind of hardware were you running on?

(I don't use uBlock on mobile, but I might go look into it...)

My only complaint is that it doesn't integrate quite as well as Chrome, but I
don't think that's Mozilla's fault.

~~~
Miraste
I tried it on a Galaxy Tab s5e and an LG v35, which have last year's mid-range
Qualcomm chip and 2018's high-end chip respectively. On the v35 loading was
slow, and sometimes it would crash or make all my tabs blank until restarted.
On the tablet it couldn't even scroll down a page without lagging. I haven't
run into any other apps that do this on either device. Zooming was always
laggy and a bit _off_ \--bad acceleration curves or something--enough that
they've redone it from scratch for other platforms instead of trying to fix
the code.

There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.

~~~
mtrower
That's crazy =(

That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is
just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy.

I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it
sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I
guess..?

------
nneonneo
FYI, if you're switching to Firefox, I strongly (strongly) recommend checking
out the Tree Style Tab extension ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)), which puts all your tabs in a tree in a
sidebar. Once you have it installed and are happy with it, you can remove the
horizontal tab bar entirely and gain a nice chunk of precious vertical space
([https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-
fo...](https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-
style-rules#on-firefox-69-and-later)).

I use a slightly more compact layout that saves space and lets me see more
tabs; put this in "Advanced->Extra style rules" in the addon preferences:

    
    
        /* Compact tab layout */
        :root { --tab-height: 20px !important; }
        .tab { height: 20px !important; }
        /* Shrink space between pinned tabs and tab bar, only when pins are present */
        #tabbar[style*="margin"] { margin-top: 20px !important; }
    

I've used this extension for nearly a decade at this point, and I could never
imagine switching back to a top tab bar. It scales very nicely to an arbitrary
number of tabs, organizes them in a highly natural way, and gives you a bunch
of new power-user ways to manage your tabs (close a whole tree, migrate
subtrees to new windows, ...).

~~~
sevencolors
I've never understood this AddOn. Maybe it's because I use less than 8 tabs
and am diligent about closing ones I don't need.

Does it reduce memory because it's more like a temporary bookmark system?

Why does it look so ugly :(

~~~
nimih
It's specifically an addon for folks who normally have dozens (or hundreds) of
tabs open, and I can only imagine it's actively detrimental to someone who
only has a handful of tabs at a time.

IMO you should just be thankful that your workflow/habits haven't develop in
such a way that you benefit from the organizational power of tree style tabs
;-P

~~~
CWuestefeld
I'm a zillion tab person. But even aside from that, it improves the usability
of the browser.

A problem with browser UI is that - given our monitor form factor - it makes
text hard to read. Studies show that very wide columns of text are harder to
read than something relatively narrower.

By changing the viewing pane of the browser, moving the tabs off the top and
to the side, we mitigate that extra-wide shape somewhat, making the text more
easily readable while giving ourselves a bit more vertical space.

------
amenod
> To date, CORS network errors have been shown as warnings, making them too
> easy to overlook when resources could not load. Now they are correctly
> reported as errors, not warnings, to give them the visibility they deserve.

I know this is a small improvement (s/warning/error), but like it
nevertheless. What I would _LOVE_ however is that CORS errors would be
displayed where it would make sense - in the Network tab. When I'm debugging
connections I am looking there, not in Console.

~~~
digitarald
Firefox dev here. Making sure failed requests are properly highlighted in
Network panel is a big one on our list!

~~~
amenod
Very glad to hear that! Now that I know what is going on, I check the console
whenever the request doesn't appear in Network tab, but it is very
unintuitive. Keep up the good work!

------
sydney6
Soon, People, Soon: [Wayland] Implement ffmpeg/VAAPI video playback

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1610199](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1610199)

~~~
whalesalad
I wish I could take Wayland for a spin but it feels like HL3 vaporware that
only a select few individuals are actually capable of using. (I have an nVidia
card)

~~~
catalogia
"Select few" being anybody with an Intel or AMD GPU? That's actually quite a
lot of people. Shit not working properly is one of the prices you choose to
pay when you choose to purchase hardware with poor FOSS driver support.

~~~
whalesalad
My poor little Intel GPU can't do 4K and the last 2 AMD GFX cards I purchased
had such brutally bad coil whine I decided to switch brands out of sheer
frustration.

The Nvidia card I have now is silent and works pretty well.

One day I'll get to take Wayland for a test drive.

------
mrspeaker
"Did you know that console logs can be styled using backgrounds? For even more
variety, you can add images, using data-uris"

Ha ha, oh my... Sooo many recruiting ads coming our way!

[Edit: also the WebSocket inspector is really awesome. I wish I had that years
ago!]

~~~
bambax
What's the point of spending time on that?? Some bugs have been open for a
very long time that don't appear to have been fixed in this release [0]... but
we can select a background color in the console????

[0]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1220696](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1220696)

~~~
kbenson
The point is it's open source, so people will volunteer to work on what they
want. Just because the bugs you cared about weren't worked on doesn't mean
this work took any resources away that could have been applied to them.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yes, but presumably Moz with their $300M from Google, or whatever it is
(pretty sure it's of that order) also surely employ a few programmers to
squash bugs, so just waving your hand and saying "volunteer developers"
doesn't quite answer the parent commenters dissatisfaction.

~~~
floriol
And they so squash bugs? Yeah there def some old ones, but a priority was
chosen for them and work continuous based on that.

------
hstaab
I switched to Firefox Dev Edition last year and havnt gone back since. It
really does have a noticeably smoother feel to it. I do miss certain Chrome
dev tools such as Lighthouse, however its not a difficult transition at all.

I hope more people take the leap.

~~~
digitarald
Firefox dev here: Just to understand the use case (and others can pile on too)
– do you use Lighthouse for online staged/prod sites or local testing?

~~~
pawelk
I use Chrome to benchmark my local version of a website. The use case is very
limited, because the results fluctuate a lot depending on the overall load on
my machine (including the dev server), so I usually do three passes on the
master branch of my project, get scores like 53, 56, 51, then switch to my
development branch, three passes again, if I see e.g. 58, 56, 61 then it's
fine, if the results are noticeably lower than master then time to
investigate.

In any case we have a dedicated environment with lighthouse-ci and this is
where the real pre-release benchmarks are executed.

------
jonawesomegreen
With Safari removing my ability to use uBlock in version 13, I've been wanting
to make the jump back to Firefox on the desktop. The one thing that has been
holding me back is that Firefox can't use the OSX Keychain for passwords. All
my passwords are in my OSX/iCloud Keychain, and this is great. It works on my
iOS devices and on my Mac and everything is lovely, but its keeping me using
Safari on the desktop.

There was an extension that did this, but the API it relies on was removed in
FF 57 with the switch to the extension API.

~~~
icanhackit
Long time Safari user as well, primarily for its speed and OSX feature
integration (keychain). Made the jump back to Firefox in December and
installed uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript and a
video ripper/transcoder.

While entering my passwords into FF and exporting/importing bookmarks was a
minor (and brief) annoyance, the utter joy of using a feature rich and secure
browser with no ads made it worth the switch, even if I don't have keychain
integration.

Give it a go, even just for a week.

------
globalproctd
I'm an avid, avid, avid Firefox user, but I switched to Vivaldi last month
after doing a comparison of RAM load with the same exact open tabs and seeing
a difference of:

Firefox sitting at 12 gigs Vivaldi sitting at 5 gigs

This is on MacOS, so mileage may vary and all that, but with the same tabs
open, why would there be such a difference?

Edit: And there's no difference in the plugins. I use the same plugins on both
browsers: password manager, uBlock Origin, React dev tools, and Redux dev
tools and that's it.

~~~
vsareto
I wish I knew but something has always bothered me about people jumping
browsers due to open tab usage for tab counts above 20.

Is that really the only feature people care about?

~~~
SkyMarshal
When it completely bogs down the browser so that opening a new window stakes
5s and other normal actions are extremely laggy, no other features matter.
This can happen even on my 64GB workstation when Firefox hasn’t consumed all
the available memory yet. Performance is a feature.

(That said I continue to use Firefox exclusively b/c 1) Firefox is really good
now, 2) best addon/extension support, 3) Google’s leadership is Evil now, and
4) I don’t want a rendering engine monoculture).

~~~
webmobdev
That's understandable. But what exactly is the thought process in having so
many tabs (10+) open in the first place?

~~~
newscracker
Having multiple tabs (or "too many tabs") is a neat and very visible way to
keep track of what's to be read and processed. It does result in keeping
things for far too long sometimes, but there is no better interface that
surfaces all the different sites/URLs to be processed. It's very useful when
you're troubleshooting or researching something (could be some tech stuff in
general, some software development/debugging stuff or anything else you're
researching).

~~~
webmobdev
Ok, using browser tabs as "bookmarks".

I used to do something similar too with Opera (the original one with Presto
engine) but with their "Speed Dial" feature. I miss Presto Opera - it was
light-weight, fast and wasn't bogged down by even with 100's of open tabs and
had fantastic browser features that nearly all their competitors copied.

~~~
newscracker
It's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a
quickly accessible way (unless the tab has been unloaded manually or through
another extension), and it also stores history (you can go back and forward in
each of those tabs). Bookmarks and "Speed Dial" (which is available on
Firefox) do not support tab history. I do not know how Opera's Speed Dial
worked though.

~~~
webmobdev
> _It 's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a
> quickly accessible way_

I am skeptical about this part. If you tag your bookmark's, it then becomes
easy to look it up right from the address bar by just typing a tag name. That
is actually much easier and faster than searching through 100's or 1000's of
tabs.

> _... and it also stores history_

That's a very good point that I hadn't considered.

------
tyrion
I just set up a small monthly donation to Mozilla. You can do the same if you
wish at: [https://donate.mozilla.org](https://donate.mozilla.org)

I think it is worth it since I have been using FF since forever for free.

~~~
newscracker
Note that donations go to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit parent of Mozilla
Corporation that works on an open web and other social initiatives. Mozilla
Corporation, the maker of Firefox, does not get anything from your donations
because of the way these organizations are structured.

I've asked about this here before (how to support MoCo and Firefox with
money), but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that so far. This is one of
the reasons Mozilla Corporation has been looking at other services, like the
VPN service we've heard of, to get more revenue. Mozilla Corporation also laid
off several people from the Firefox team recently because...not enough money,
in very simple terms! This is not to say that one must not donate to Mozilla
Foundation. Just be aware of where your money can go and what it can be used
for.

On the other hand, donations to Mozilla Thunderbird go directly to Thunderbird
development, maintenance, etc.

Edit: Removed an erroneous statement about the search engine partnerships.

~~~
tyrion
Thanks for bringing this up. I remember reading something similar in a
previous thread, but while making the donation I couldn't think of why it
would be a reason not do donate anyway.

If I could donate directly towards ff development, I would probably choose to
do so. Anyway from your comment I get the impression that donating to Moz
Foundation is not such a great idea. If so, could you elaborate why?

My reasoning is this: I wish to donate to the people that brought me FF. If
they believe those funds are better allocated to something else (instead of FF
development), I guess it is should be their choice. Unless they start
neglecting FF I see no reason not to donate some small amount anyway.

~~~
FeepingCreature
I use Tab Mix Plus. (I'm on Waterfox just for that one extension.)

Back when Firefox switched to the new UI backend and broke approximately all
of the addons, it was promised that the missing APIs they'd ditched would be
re-added post release as JS APIs. This is now many years overdue.

Frnakly, I disagree that it should be their choice, and will not donate until
they give me an avenue to donate to Firefox Browser specifically.

~~~
newscracker
I miss Tab Mix Plus too. I also miss Session Manager, Lazarus form recovery,
etc. It's been very frustrating that Firefox hasn't provided adequate support
for these fantastic extensions to continue in the WebExtensions world.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Tab Session Manager is a WebExtension. I'm not familiar enough with the others
to know what's missing and can't be replicated, but session management is
alive and well.

------
seumars
20 year old bug coming through:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572)

------
chrshawkes
I think Firefox shines when it comes to flexbox, grid, CSS animations &
dealing with fonts. Aside from those key features, Firefox and Chrome are
roughly identical when it comes to debugging capabilities and being memory
hogs.

------
newhotelowner
I recently started using Firefox more. I love containers. Firefox should make
the extension part of the Firefox install wizard or ask the user to install it
after you install the firefox.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
Even better, delete all cookies, session and local data for each domain after
all tabs for this domain have been closed (after 15 seconds), unless the user
specifically whitelist a particular website. Like the amazing Cookie
AutoDelete addons, that has completely changed my browser usage.

------
geddy
It took some time, but I finally feel comfortable with Firefox. I stuck with
Brave for a while but the weird blockchain bookmarks syncing worked like total
shit, and I'd open a browser on my nth device and it'd reset my bookmarks to
what they were three weeks ago. Total nightmare.

Firefox is working great currently.

I have one gripe and it's that the DevTools frame doesn't let you drag-resize
on the _entire_ bar. That is, the tab bar (Inspector, Console, Network,
Debugger, etc). On Chrome, you can click anywhere on the bar and drag it up.
As a web developer, I'm constantly resizing the viewport, and sometimes it's
nice to have a larger console, but I have roughly ~2px to work with every
time, and it takes some trial and error a lot of the time.

Would be nice for a fix to that soon.

------
numbers
Excited to see NextDNS being added to DNS over HTTPS. I’ve been using them
device wide but this just means more people will be able to find them.

------
jakobdabo
Previously I had managed to force Firefox not to make unwanted automatic
connections using gHacks user.js [0] and this official guide [1], but this new
version makes a connection to firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com after
startup no matter what. Not a big deal, but leaves a bad aftertaste from the
upgrade.

[0] [https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-
user.js](https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js)

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-
making...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-
automatic-connections)

------
CodesInChaos
Does "Zoom text only" only change the default text size (and thus the `rem`
unit) or does it have other effects as well?

------
axelfontaine
Strangely lately Firefox has been failing both Acid2 and Acid3 tests (see
[https://www.acidtests.org/](https://www.acidtests.org/)) even though it used
to pass them years ago.

~~~
komali2
...so?

> and the Acid Tests are correspondingly no longer being maintained. Acid3, in
> particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer reflects the
> consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes
> to issues affecting mobile browsers. The tests remain available for
> historical purposes and for use by browser vendors. It would be
> inappropriate, however, to use them as part of a certification process,
> especially for mobile browsers.

------
unethical_ban
>...The General tab in Preferences now has a Zoom tool. You can use this
feature to set the magnification level applied to all pages you load. You can
also specify whether all page contents should be enlarged, or only text. We
know this is a hugely popular feature because of the number of extensions that
offer this functionality. Selective zoom as a native feature is a huge boon to
users.

This is terrific! I have been shocked that this has not been a feature with
accessibility otherwise having decent focus from major software vendors.

I no longer have to have the zoom level preference in my toolbar to tune every
site.

------
iamleppert
The developer tools still need a lot of performance work. Why does the UI
crash or become unresponsive? The UI needs to be decoupled from whatever state
is being managed by the tools and incrementally updated on whatever state
changes. It doesn’t feel like that when using the tools as they get slower and
slower the larger and more complex the application.

There doesn’t appear to be any notion of paging. A good example is the
console. I should be able to have an infinite log, limited by my available
memory. Under no circumstances should the tools crash or get slow when dealing
with a large or complicated console output. It feels like that although I’m
only viewing a few dozen lines of the console the entire buffer is rendered
and then clipped out. The console and many other features get slower and
slower the more data I’m working with. Expanding and inspecting an array with
100 items should be no different from inspecting a list with 50 million items.
This is something that chrome devtools just works, so whatever they are doing
Firefox just needs to copy that in order for the tools to be useable on
anything other than trivial demo’s.

If the goal is to be able to develop UI’s in Firefox that can manage large
datasets in the browser the devtools themselves need to be able to work with
such data. Otherwise, what’s the point?

------
maga
And still no support for RegExp features from ES2018(!), i.e. named groups
[1]. I love FF as much as the next web dev, but sometimes features fall by the
wayside, and it takes forever for FF to implement them. For example, it took
literally years for FF to implement focusin/focusout events after they were
standardized and all other browsers implemented them.

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362154](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362154)

------
ignasl
Still waiting for when Firefox starts supporting Matroska container for
videos. Right now it cannot play h264 recorded by Chrome as Chrome puts it in
Matroska for some reason. Bugzilla:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422891](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422891)

------
brylie
One of the pain points of developing with Firefox dev tools, which has kept me
on Chromium for development, is lack of proper formatting for tracebacks.
Reading tracebacks in FF has been quite an eye strain, whereas Chromium offers
syntax highlighting and formats tracebacks for readability.

------
kakuri
It will be nice if Firefox restores support for high-quality scaling.
transform(scale) used to work well, then for a long time it produced horribly
pixelated text. They improved it a few months back, but it's still noticeably
pixelated. Chrome is perfectly smooth.

~~~
kevingadd
This is an ongoing struggle for the graphics teams involved with both
browsers, and the behavior will be different depending on OS. It _really
helps_ if you file bug reports for text quality issues that provide an example
of the scenario that looks wrong. I've had multiple text/transform quality
issues fixed in both Firefox and Chrome by providing examples of corner cases
that perform badly.

The CSS + HTML specs (and the general nature of the primitives involved) make
it very very difficult to get this right in every case.

Your issue is almost certainly not a question of 'high quality scaling' and
instead a question of how the heuristics are selecting the source resolution
to rasterize the text at.

fwiw in the long run it would be possible to solve many quality issues
specifically for transformed text by using variable-rate shading (like Slug,
maybe Pathfinder) but this is still effectively a research area, I'm not aware
of it being shipped in real software.

------
DantesKite
On a related note, I find myself using Safari for its password management and
Chrome for everything else because it’s so pleasant to use on mobile. They
really nailed down the icons and animations (which doesn’t seem like it would
be that important compared to other issues going on). You’d think privacy
would be a major concern for me but when I observe my behavior honestly, it
doesn’t seem to be that big of a factor.

The voice to text feature on Chrome is really useful too when you’re searching
for something and don’t want to type it all out. Stunningly accurate. iOS has
a built-in voice-to-text feature on their keyboard but it’s not as good.

------
xvilka
It would be nice to have the progress bar like "XX% of C++ code was rewritten
in Rust" for every new Firefox release.

------
jsilence
Would love to see an option in FF to only give CPU to the visible tab and
sleep all others. I have a lot (!!!) of open tabs and ever so often one of
them seems to go wild and CPU hogs. Have to restart FF for remedy.

------
TheRealPomax
Glad to see console background images being fixed. console.table is nice but
sometimes you just need a console.plot, and that doesn't work without
background-image styling.

------
bachmeier
Another Firefox release means yet again my browser's going to quit working
while I'm busy in the middle of the workday. It'll offer to restart, but it
won't work, and then I'll have to reload all my pages manually.

I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix. I never switched to Chrome at
any point. This behavior is so damn annoying that it might be the one thing
that actually gets me to switch.

~~~
digitarald
I am on Nightly which updates 2x daily without problems. If restart doesn't
work maybe try a re-install. Filing a bug would be great so Firefox devs can
work with you to find a root cause.

On Windows it should background update now as well.

------
abinaya_rl
With the way that they are releasing new versions frequently, It is going to
be a future. Good job Mozilla!

------
franczesko
I'd prefer the mobile version of the browser to be more polished, rather than
the desktop one.

~~~
ac29
Firefox Preview (early release of next generation Firefox on Android) has been
improving fairly rapidly. Extension support landed in nightly a week or so
ago, for those who have been holding off on checking it out.

~~~
galangalalgol
I switched that day. Ublock origin was the only thing holding me back. I like
it. I do want my I don't care about cookies add on.

------
harsher
I think it's inevitable that we'll see a steady increase in Firefox's market
share.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I think you are being optimistic. Like, "Year of the Linux Desktop"
optimistic. The fact is that Firefox has earned its tiny marketshare by not
providing significant value for its drawbacks except to a relatively small
segment of vocal people on HN. Their past hijinks don't help either.

------
lars_francke
A year or so ago they introduced a bug (was it with the Quantum release) that
Firefox would eat huge amounts of CPU (basically pegged at 100%) if used on
MacOS with a scaled resolution.

Any idea if there has been any progress on this issue? Last time I tried a few
months ago it still wasn't fixed.

------
dempedempe
Addons are still not available in Reader View. :(

------
braindongle
Still no LastPass on Android. Why is this so?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Is that a firefox problem, or has lastpass just not made their extension
mobile-capable?

~~~
braindongle
Did a little more reading and, my bad. For both Android and iOS the LastPass
app works within browsers. No extension needed. Was maybe trying to justify
not switching my life to FF from Chrome because PITA. Oughtta just do it.

------
mike50
So what features are removed, added despite user complaints or demonstrate an
inability to understand how the internet works?

------
inviromentalist
My Firefox install is at least 30x slower than chrome.

Is this my fault?

It's what prevents me from using Firefox.

~~~
veilrap
What does 30x slower mean? Is this a benchmarking issue? Firefox UX
responsiveness? Website responsiveness?

Personally, I've never had a problem with my daily firefox usage, perf is
basically indistinguishable from other major browsers like Chrome and Edge.

~~~
inviromentalist
It's exactly how it sounds. Reddit loads in 1s on chrome and 30s in Firefox.

I used to blame my computer for not having enough free space, but now that I
have 200GB of SSD free, I suppose I need to blame the software at some point.

~~~
sp332
Sounds like something isn't loading and Firefox waits for it to time out.

~~~
magicalhippo
Not a Chrome user, but didn't they recently bypass the system DNS in favor for
their own? If so, a slow DNS could explain it as well.

~~~
sp332
Yeah but that's experimental and it's supposed to have failsafes and
fallbacks. I guess it's possible that it malfunctioned, and I'd never rule out
DNS more generally though.

~~~
magicalhippo
I meant the other way around: Google's DNS being fast and the local one being
slow. At least I've experienced on more than one occasion my ISP DNS taking
forever to resolve some domain where Cloudflare's or Google's DNS responded
quickly.

~~~
sp332
Oh I misunderstood because Firefox also started experimenting with DOH lately.
So it could be either, yeah!

------
inshadows
TL;DR Firefox development is focused on helping web developers deliver more
junk to users, safely.

Mozilla never actually caring about user features:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1520119](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1520119)

Mozilla introducing unnecessary complexity and denying sane configuration
management in the name of performance:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/08/03/new-backend-
for-s...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/08/03/new-backend-for-storage-
local-api/)

Mozilla just being bored I guess:
[https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-get-old-
firefox...](https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-get-old-firefox-
aboutconfig-menu-back.htm)

~~~
minitech
> Mozilla never actually caring about user features:
> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1520119](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1520119)

(a link to a fixed bug)

~~~
inshadows
In version 74. I linked this to illustrate, that features for users are made
hastily, as if by "intern", to check the box and get paid. I cannot imagine a
job or a student project where I was tasked to make keyboard shortcuts editor
and got away with implementation that lacked ability to delete shortcut. But I
get it. Since Firefox is for free, I have to either a) shut up, or b) hail it
positively. There's no room for negative feedback.

~~~
majewsky
You mean like the room right here where you're literally providing negative
feedback right now?

------
fsajkdnjk
it would be nice if firefox would stop sending unapproved requests on the
background to mozilla's infra. i am tired of blacklisting all those domains in
my hosts file. also the famous welcome screen full of google and other
trackers... epic joke on the users.

also, still not having custom search engines via keywords in the url bar, like
chrome, is so lame.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Erm, they've had keywords for ages?

I thought they also had some defaults, but I use "g $word1 $word2" for Google
search from the address bar for what feels like over a decade. The don't have
the fancy UI to go with it that Chrome has.

