
Firefox 80 - amake
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/80.0/releasenotes/
======
mindcrime
I had switched away from FF to use Chrome predominately a few years ago, for a
mix of various reasons. Performance being a big one. But I've been thinking
more about the whole browser monoculture issue, and the importance of Mozilla
and Firefox for the Open Web in general lately, so about a week or two ago I
started switching back to Firefox as my primary browser. So far, so good.
Performance feels pretty snappy so far, and I haven't run across many
rendering issues, and none that really matter.

All in all, I'd say that if you have been considering Firefox, now might be a
good time to give it a shot.

This is all, BTW, in reference to the desktop version (Linux specifically) not
mobile.

~~~
godelski
> This is all, BTW, in reference to the desktop version (Linux specifically)
> not mobile.

Mobile is better, because you can install uBlock. As far as I'm aware Chrome
mobile still doesn't allow addons.

As for FF on the main browser, they really shot themselves in the foot years
ago and left a bad taste in any users' mouths. I see this same message in
every HN FF update thread (since quantum). They really did fix most of the
bugs and speed, but it is hard to build the brand back. The only
performance/bug I sometimes get is if I'm doing a heavy research day and open
a metric ton of tabs (>100) and things get pushed into swap and don't release,
even after closing FF. But Chrome was always a memory hog as well so it isn't
enough to cause me to switch over and this is a niche thing (and easy to
resolve).

~~~
JBiserkov
Right now I have 376 tabs open in Firefox, on Windows laptop with 8 GB RAM.
They were 600, but I did a purge a few months ago. 0

0 performance problems.

Just my 2 cents.

~~~
jabirali
We have very different experiences in that case.

Once I go past ~100 open tabs on Firefox, on a 16GB RAM Linux laptop, my whole
system freezes. I experienced these issues as late as in June, so it doesn't
appear to have been recently fixed either. Note that I do use uBlock Origin so
it doesn't just buckle under from ads, but I also make heavy use of Container
Tabs, which may also be a factor.

Luckily, the extension "Auto Tab Discard" solved these issues for me.

~~~
niutech
You can go to about:performance and see which tab is problematic.

~~~
jabirali
Thanks for the tip! I currently don't have many tabs open, but was surprised
to see every one of my work Office365 tabs (mail, calendar, etc.) at 100+ MB
each...

------
madmax108
I know it's a hard time for the engineering team at Mozilla right now, but
just wanted to put it out there: You guys are truly awesome! Thanks for
everything.

~~~
agumonkey
seconded, tru marathonists

------
ocdtrekkie
"Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer."

Neat. I loathe every time I have to install Adobe Reader for something.
Unfortunately, all browsers PDF support for things like form filling and stuff
tends to be pretty lacking.

~~~
jxy
Can they just give me an actual PDF viewer for the sole purpose of PDF
viewing? Is it really the way forward? Bundling everything into a web browser?
It feels like a giant security hole.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Honestly, I really miss Edge's EPUB support. Like _really_ miss it. There's a
lot of things I think browsers should not do. WebUSB? WebMIDI? Burn these
things with _fire_. Do not connect the web browser to hardware.

Web browsers are supposed to actually be document viewers. HTML is a _document
format_. I am 100% on-board with web browsers also reading PDFs and EPUBs.

I know Mozilla is hurting for manpower right now, but I'd drop dead with
excitement if EPUB support came to Firefox.

~~~
mhh__
Not really sure about WebUSB but WebMIDI is pretty harmless, surely?

The browser probably won't be good enough to replace Ableton (or similar) for
a while but it is the primary medium for a lot of digital (interactive)
artwork - for projects that use sound it's nice to plug a MIDI device straight
into the browser.

~~~
acolumb
As long as VSTs are native-only (which based on the low-latency nature of
audio processing would probably never see a cloud implementation,) web-based
DAWs will never replace locally-run ones. Most music studios airgap their
systems anyway.

~~~
flingo
You could probably get alright performance running in the browser using
webassembly. No idea if anyone's working on anything like that.

~~~
lioeters
I'm curious too. From a quick search, I found WebDSP, "A client-side DSP
library utilizing the power of WebAssembly".

[https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp](https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp)

> WebDSP is a collection of highly performant algorithms, which are designed
> to be building blocks for web applications that aim to operate on media
> data.

> The methods are written in C++ and compiled to WASM, and exposed as simple
> vanilla Javascript functions developers can run on the client side.

..On further reading, they have functions for video and image processing, but
not audio as far as I can tell.

\---

There's Glissando, "A web-based digital audio workstation using the web
platform APIs (Web Audio, Web MIDI) and WebAssembly".

[https://github.com/glissando-daw/glissando-app](https://github.com/glissando-
daw/glissando-app)

They mention "VST support", but I cannot imagine how that's possible from the
web.

------
rcMgD2BwE72F
More importantly, Firefox for Android has a brand new UI (and more):
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-
new-f...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-new-firefox-
for-android-experience/) (GeckoView, picture in picture, Enhanced Tracking
Protection, persistent private mode, dark theme…).

The most awaited version in years.

HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269156)

~~~
nuxi
Not sure if you tried it, but for me it was an absolute shitshow. It
"upgrades" your settings, so if you then downgrade the app, everything is lost
(as you have to uninstall + manually install the old apk). In my case it also
decided to reset overridden settings to "defaults" (search engine, save
passwords etc.), plus about:config was gone and the homepage cannot be set to
bookmarks anymore. I uninstalled it and went back to the latest 68.x, and am
now looking for a new browser on Android, possibly one that doesn't treat me
like an idiot.

~~~
shandor
It breaks my heart to say this, but I agree completely on the 'shitshow'.

I've been using FF as my main driver for over ten years, and on mobile every
second I've been able to.

I fail to come up with a thing they didn't ruin with this new "revamp
everything".

\- The home page is worse

\- THEY BROKE THE BACK BUTTON.Like seriously, you could get your tab's history
and jump back more than one page. Now the long-press does nothing

\- Oh, breaking the back button doesn't end there. Previously you could close
your current tab with Back, and FF would either close the tab or go to the FF
start screen. Now, all the tabs are left open, and I have to go manually to my
tabs list and close them one by one. Why?

\- probably something else. Or maybe I'm just too angry at my Ol' reliable
workhorse so suddenly cheating on me :(

Edit:

\- It's also slower than ever, I've never had any qualms about FF for Androids
speed until now.

~~~
the_pwner224
One more thing: you can't get a desktop-style tab bar on top anymore, instead
you are forced to use the tab button to open the view with all your tabs on
it.

Previously you could go to Android Settings => Developer Options and increase
'Minimum width' / 'Smallest width' which would make the phone think its screen
was physically bigger, making it so that the Android UI elements were no
longer hilariously large and making Firefox switch to the tablet view with the
tab bar, well before the point where the UI got too small to use/read.

I figure it'll be a number of years before Android updates make FF 68.x stop
working, and while security updates do happen I doubt any of the websites
visited by the types of people on HN are going to be compromised and running
exploits for old Android FF versions. Plus you have the Android
permissions/sandboxing stuff.

------
teekert
While we are on the topic, did any get the new FF on their Android phones last
week? What happened? It completely breaks my flow of opening a page, reading,
going back to my favorite sites and opening a new page <repeat>.. The only way
to find your favorites now is opening a new tap, you'll find that when hitting
the small tab counter and then the +. You will gather piles of tabs and they
are still there after you close the browser (no more setting to forget them
upon close). I like the bar at the bottom but that is the only nice thing. Am
I missing something? Play store reviews are also pretty negative...

~~~
jackewiehose
I got the update today and I hate it. The new UI just requires more tapping,
has less features and rendering isn't even faster! The whole web-experience
actually feels more messy because uMatrix is missing.

I don't get it. Firefox mobile was how old? Two years? Is that the new
standard of software-development where you ditch your source every few years
and rewrite from scratch?

I'm very disappointed.

~~~
teekert
Do you use favorites much? How do go to your next site of interest?

~~~
jackewiehose
In the previous version I had all my most visited sites as toplevel-bookmarks
(which were displayed in the new-tab-page) and a bookmark-folder with "maybe-
read-later"-bookmarks. That was never very good on mobile because there was no
way to reorder bookmarks.

Now I have my most visited sites in the new "top sites" section and the rest
goes to bookmarks. Works for me but there is also absolutely no benefit to
before (bookmarks are even less accessible). And you still can't reorder any
bookmarks/top-sites/collections nor export/import them.

But why fix old bugs or implement requested features when you can just start
completely new and ignore the users. That's definitely more fun for the
programmers.

~~~
teekert
So indeed there is no other way to open a new site than by opening a new tab
first. Don't you find that annoying? Or do you navigate back constantly?

~~~
jackewiehose
I find it annoying. The whole update brought nothing but annoyances.

------
qmarchi
"We'd like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who
contributed to this release of Firefox."

How ironic.

~~~
SilasX
"... and we wish them well in their future endeavors."

~~~
freshsqueeze
goodbye and thanks for all the fish / $500M a yr from google

------
likeafox
The one feature I wish FF had is a UI based profile switcher - container tabs,
which are now relegated to being an extension, simply are not cutting it for
me. Does anyone know if there's a chance of that making it into the roadmap
within the next couple years?

~~~
kbenson
> container tabs, which are now relegated to being an extension

Now? Haven't they always been?

> simply are not cutting it for me.

Do you mind explaining why? I had some problems with them initially (when they
first went into production FF), but some small tweaks since then and they've
_mostly_ worked exactly as I would want.

The only complaints I have are Google, which I try to relegate to a container,
making it really hard to open stuff in different containers because of how
they send links in Gmail through a redirect to protect referrer info and
making it hard to have separate Google accounts in different tabs (which i
could probably resolve mos the issues by not assigning Google to a container
by default so some of the switching is more smooth, but _ick_ ), and LastPass,
which I only really need for work (as I use FF sync for my passwords).

LastPass doesn't seem to be able to deal with containers and work SSO which
auto redirects to a container, so I can't even sign in with LastPass without
tweaking container domain assignments, and toggling that stuff every time I
want to log in is ridiculous.

Other than those, everything works pretty smoothly, IMO. I have 18 containers,
of which 6-7 see consistent heavy use, and the most rest are for occasional
things and are used once every few days.

~~~
dave5104
> Do you mind explaining why?

I want full blown segregated browser experiences, a la Chrome's profiles.
Firefox's containers are great for what I use them for (sandboxing Twitter and
Facebook), but I'd really like an entirely different profile for "work" vs.
"personal"\--with separate browsing history, favorites, cookies, extensions,
etc.

I know Firefox offers that functionality (via about:profiles), but as far as I
know, it's not as simple to access in Chrome (clicking an icon and choosing
your new profile).

That being said, I still use Firefox day to day, but I sorely miss the ease of
access of Chrome's.

~~~
uHuge
Would a .bat/.bash file with `firefox -P "profileWork"` be of help?

~~~
dave5104
Maybe it would! But I'd prefer profile swapping become a first class Firefox
UI citizen like it is in Chrome. Until then, visiting about:profiles is better
than finagling with bash, at least for me.

------
trevor-e
It's a bit mind-blowing to me how big browser apps have become the last few
years. Firefox 80 takes up 210.8MB and Chrome _689.8MB_ on my MacBook.

~~~
Minor49er
Back in the late 90s-early 2000s, Microsoft baked Internet Explorer into the
Windows shell. It was badically powering the desktop. Ypu could even set ypur
desktop background to an HTML page on Windows at one time. But basically, the
browser has been given an enormous amount of responsibility that has not
changed much since those experiments. We now have things like Chromebooks that
are little more than an OS with just a browser attached.

~~~
kbenson
> We now have things like Chromebooks that are little more than an OS with
> just a browser attached.

Which makes sense because a browser is basically a set of abstractions over
some normal OS functions that blends remote and local actions (even if only a
subset of them).

Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this through
HTML and JavaScript. They're going even farther with WASM.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this
> through HTML and JavaScript.

Java succeeded, you know. Still happily powers embedded systems, servers, and
desktop applications. Still runs the same binaries on
NT/Darwin/Linux/Haiku/whatever. Don't dismiss it just because it's not the
latest hotness.

~~~
kbenson
I'm not dismissing it... but it's being eaten. The Web is the ultimate
platform. Every goal Java and the JVM had (that they didn't mostly drop, like
native bytecode CPUs) has either been achieved, surpassed, or quickly will be
by browsers, Javascript and WASM.

The only holdouts I see are stuff where Java is part of the standard (e.g. SIM
cards using Java Card standard) or embedded systems where they use Java of
some sort where it doesn't make sense to use the enormous browser runtimes
(although I have to imagine that's a less popular option than C, but I'm not
super informed on the embedded market).

I mean, I'm not particularly a fan of where this is heading (it feels like
we're heading for the second coming of Java applets/flash and all those
associated problem), but it seems pretty obvious, to me at least.

------
kstenerud
Firefox has been constantly crashing for the past 6 months or so on all of my
computers (Linux, Windows, and now a new Mac as well - but mostly linux,
probably because I use it most). Usually it's just a bunch of tabs that crash
(almost always multiple tabs), but about 2-3 times a week the entire browser
crashes. It's getting to the point where I don't want to use ff anymore :/

~~~
clumsysmurf
I seem to have enough windows / tabs open, that when it starts up on OS X it
causes a kernel panic ~ 50% time and brings down the whole machine. If it
manages to start everything is OK until I try to restart it. Of course, this
is technically a problem with OS X but ... no other app manages to do this.

~~~
tynorf
Out of curiosity, how many windows/tabs? I routinely launch FF with dozens of
windows/hundreds of tabs and I've never had macOS kernel panic in that case.

------
kozmonaut
Have used firefox forever. Their PDF rendering engine is quick and snappy.

------
akerro
After recent events I feel quite nostalgic or sad about new Firefox releases,
I can't justify it

------
ColanR
It sure would be nice if the memory leaks would be fixed. On some of the long-
running machines I use, I have to use chrome because Firefox would eventually
fill up the RAM.

------
kayson
I really like the simplicity of the Firefox pdf viewer but sometimes it
absolutely butchers printing. It also still needs fill able form support. Come
on Mozilla!

~~~
seppel
Firefox is my standard browser but it is completely unusable for printing
anything; I always have to switch to Chrome to print.

~~~
matsemann
Try and select "Print" from the menu instead of Ctrl+P. Instead of bringing up
the system print dialog, this brings up an interface where you can tweak the
print layout. No idea why it isn't the default view when pressing ctrl+p. At
least there I feel it's basically the same as Chrome when printing.

~~~
exciteabletom
On my Linux system Ctrl+p and File->print are the same dialog box.

------
royal_ts
Is there any kind of road for when to expect installable Web Apps the way it's
possible in Chrome and Edge?

~~~
esclerofilo
On desktop? They are working on it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/eay1x1/firefox_73_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/eay1x1/firefox_73_adds_support_for_site_specific_browser/fb15u5h/)

I don't know enough about mozilla's process to understand why bugzilla says
it's already done, though.

------
jreed91
Does anyone have the issue within developer tools that when you ctl-c a
highlighted piece of text it actually just selects the whole line? I have to
right click copy to get the exact piece of info I want. It’s driving me nuts.

------
badhabit
there's no easy way to disable javascript on site viewing. brave got ir right
with brave shield.

add disable image on the ff shield then it's even more useful.

brave suffers chrome's always forced refresh when stale tab is reopened or
when page is scrolled up to induce reload wheel

sometimes users do not want the freshest page. there's a reload button for
that. sometimes we just want to save the stale page.

------
takeda
The title should be "Firefox turns 80" ;)

------
hatsunearu
Is video acceleration on Linux here yet? :(

~~~
laksdjfkasljdf
i think on 79 you already got X11 support (was there for a while on wayland,
if you truly care about UI performance)

~~~
refracture
Seems 80 for sure has it for X11. It's less about UI performance and more
about battery life and heat; I might consider installing a Linux distro on my
laptop now, last time I did the poor thing ramped up like it was rendering a
video project or something anytime I pulled up a YouTube video.

~~~
bleepblorp
FWIW, notwithstanding VAAPI support in Firefox, Linux has made massive
improvements in power/heat efficiency in recent kernels.

There's much less of a starting-a-jet-engine effect in regular use if you're
able to use a distro based on kernel 5.7 or 5.8.

------
robertoandred
Why would you use a web browser as a PDF viewer instead of Preview...

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Because you already have it installed and running, appreciate the security
benefits of running a PDF render in a garbage-collected language in a sandbox,
because anything that lets you run less Adobe code is a win, and because
clicking a PDF in Firefox and having it open in Edge is generally undesirable.

~~~
robertoandred
Preview comes preinstalled, and isn't Adobe code...

------
reaperducer
_Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer.

The name reported by accessibility tools for items in multi-tiered tree
controls no longer incorrectly includes information from items at deeper
levels, providing users with the correct level of content when using a screen
reader._

I kinda expected more from an x.0 release.

~~~
Karunamon
Best to rein in those expectations. Browser developers abandoned SemVer some
time ago (bumping the major number for trivial releases with no major features
or breaking changes) for reasons that never really made a whole lot of sense
to me. Treat the version number as a monotonic counter, that's all the
information you're going to be able to make use of unless you're working on
it.

------
neiman
Oh my god, I didn't know they're still releasing those!

<silly joke warning>

------
ddon
Firefox crashing all the time on couple of my computers... the rest are doing
fine. Tried to uninstall all plugins, create new profile, all sorts of
tricks... Installed FF Nightly, hoping that this bug has been fixed in new
browsers, but keeps crashing. Sending reports to FF pretty much every day,
hoping that someone will notice, but so far, no luck. And then news came out
that Mozilla is in financial trouble and firing people, so probably nobody
will fix this :-/

~~~
zbraniecki
Hi ddon. This is _not_ normal. You may be experiencing a unique combination of
factors that results in a bug. Could you load `about:crashes` and send me an
ID or several of an your crashes? I would expect there to be a high number of
similar crashes.

It's possible that we already have a bug reported against this particular
crash and we need someone who can reproduce it to help us find a way to fix
it! I'll look to find such bug and contact you with the people who may be able
to fix it. My email is my hackernews handle `@` `mozilla.com`.

Thank you!

~~~
ddon
Very cool, thank you! Will do! And I didn't know about about:crashes page,
very interesting!

------
megous
Developer tools' network tab still unusable.

[https://megous.com/dl/tmp/01befe672faa84fe.png](https://megous.com/dl/tmp/01befe672faa84fe.png)

Selecting one resource selects multiple resources at once (sometimes 5 or
more), and you can only view one of the resources' detail in the right panel.

~~~
vehemenz
That doesn't happen for me on Mac. Maybe it's an OS-specific bug?

~~~
megous
Yes
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1640745#c23](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1640745#c23)

It happens all the time for me, because PID of my firefox processes tend to be
in millions (because of long uptimes and a me doing a lot of kernel
compilation).

Probably caused by systemd upgrade back in march. Great. Systemd is another of
those packages that keep breaking fundamentals on my systems every other
release.

Looking forward to having a network after a suspend/resume cycle again, and
systemd-home not cutting off sshd remote access to my machines via infinite
loops in its hugely complicated PAM module whenever v247 will be released. /s

------
xvilka
No layoffs mention in the release notes.

~~~
deadalus
Why would browser users care about the layoffs?

~~~
caycep
I suppose the long term view is - what's the economic health of the
organization responsible for ongoing maintenance as well as R&D, features,
engineering of the software? And also what's the risk of Firefox being
"orphaned" or falling behind technologically to Chrome/Webkit. although the
comment below is true; there is a time and place for long term strategic
comments, vs. technical release notes...

