
Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances - sahin-boydas
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/03/19/todays-firefox-aims-to-reduce-your-online-annoyances/
======
dang
Url changed from [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/66.0/releasenotes/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/66.0/releasenotes/) to the blog post about the release.

Another article on this: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/firefox-now-
automatically-...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/firefox-now-
automatically-blocks-autoplaying-audio-and-video/), deduped from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432362).

------
jessemillar
> With this update, Firefox is introducing scroll anchoring, which ensures
> that you’re not going to bounce around on the page as these slow-loading ads
> load.

While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more
excited for the scroll anchoring feature.

~~~
brink
Same. Have you ever tried to click a link only to accidentally click something
else because the page won't stop loading? It's infuriating.

~~~
airstrike
This happens to me every single day on the Windows 10 start menu and on my
iPhone using the swipe-down search on the Home screen.

Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache
obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me,
and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more
maddening

I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and
when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked
on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am _certainly_ not expecting
that to be the autocomplete...

~~~
Scramblejams
Had the same problem on my iPhone. I turned off Siri for app search (Settings
/ Siri & Search / Suggestions for Search) and now the results are instant.
(And local to my phone, so no internet-sourced results, but I’m fine with
that.)

How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I
had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it
impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results. Even though I
disabled Cortana. Incredible.

~~~
jodrellblank
_How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing._

My Windows 10 start menu lags. Press windows key or click on it, no response
for a good ten seconds or more.

I have this on my work machine, a previous install, my home machine, a Surface
Book, a remote desktop server on Windows 2016.

And yet, I've never seen anyone else talking about it. I can't believe I'm the
only one who has this "my start menu has paged out to 5400rpm disk, then
powered the disk down" experience.

~~~
Scramblejams
Same here. Sometimes I’ll click on it a good five or eight times before it
comes up. When people say Windows 10 is good, I feel like they’re living in an
alternate dimension.

~~~
naikrovek
I think you guys are the exceptions to the norm here, and not the norm.

I have too many computers at home, some verrry slow ones, and they all pop up
the start menu within a second or two unless I've _just_ booted the PC.

I work with a lot of people who use Windows 10 all day long, and I've never
heard one of them ever complain about a slow start menu. Complaints about
search results? Absolutely.

I suspect it's something you're installing, and I'm sure you'll deny that (and
you very well could be right, I don't know) and these things are time
consuming to diagnose, unfortunately.

~~~
Scramblejams
Any sufficiently popular OS is probably going to suck for ~tens of thousands
of users while at least hundreds of thousands more wonder what the fuss is
about.

A quick search yielded:

[https://www.tenforums.com/performance-
maintenance/12860-wind...](https://www.tenforums.com/performance-
maintenance/12860-windows-10-start-menu-lag-delay.html)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3doydz/windows_1...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3doydz/windows_10_start_menu_extremely_slow/)
[https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/windows-10-start-
men...](https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/windows-10-start-menu-and-
search-slow-delay.3335582/) [https://bradshacks.com/fix-start-menu-
lag/](https://bradshacks.com/fix-start-menu-lag/)
[https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-10-second-fix-for-
sluggish...](https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-10-second-fix-for-sluggish-
start-menus-in-windows-10/)

Maybe not the norm, but we're not the only ones. It's obviously an issue that
exists.

------
Vinnl
> Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the
> top of the page

That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that
you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall
reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how
annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out
of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.

~~~
freehunter
Wouldn't it be nice if browsers or servers could reserve that space even if
it's not loaded? Like "this is going to be a 500x200 image so let's load
500x200 pixels worth of empty space until it's fully loaded" and avoid
jumping.

~~~
onion2k
I _think_ you're being sarcastic, but if not and for anyone who isn't aware,
setting the width and height on an <img> tag (or it's associated style) will
do this.

~~~
ezekg
This would be a great solution, if everybody used the same screen size.

~~~
DamnInteresting
It would be nice if we could have a ratio rule in CSS for all block elements,
so adjusting one dimension would automatically alter the other, preserving the
ratio at all screen sizes. e.g.:

    
    
        width: 2000px;
        max-width: 100%;
        ratio: 16/9;
    

Of course this gets tricky when width and height are both specified and they
don't match the given ratio, but that just means that one needs to always
override the other.

Edit to add: Or maybe it would be better to just have the ability to lock the
ratio, such as:

    
    
        ratio: fixed;

~~~
onion2k
Aspect Ratio is coming in CSS4.
[https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/03/aspect-ratio-
unit-c...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/03/aspect-ratio-unit-css/)

~~~
DamnInteresting
This pleases me.

------
darkstar999
I've switched over to Firefox on all devices. It's especially useful on
Android because I can use uBlock and other useful extensions, where Chrome
doesn't have any.

The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name
in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit
tab, and then type in a search query.

~~~
toflon
I know it's not the same, but if you bookmark
"[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s"](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s")
and put in a keyword like "yt". You can type "yt whatever" in the addressbar
and it will do a search on youtube.

~~~
Zren
You can also use [https://www.reddit.com/r/%S](https://www.reddit.com/r/%S)
with a capital `%S` to avoid escaping the slashes, so you can type "r all/top"
or with GitHub "g Zren/reponame"

~~~
remram
This is exactly what I needed. I set up this exact shortcut years ago, in
Chrome, and have been slightly annoyed for months that "r sub/top" didn't work
on Firefox. Thank you stranger.

------
fimdomeio
From the last 3 or so versions Firefox performance on my retina mac is
indistinguishable from chrome (from a humam perspective not looking at ram cpu
usage), so I'm very happy to be using firefox full time once again. At some
point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max
speed. Does not happen any more.

~~~
Sharlin
> At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started
> blowing at max speed.

In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin
container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec).
`killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart
Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears
everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)

~~~
bzbarsky
The "plugin-container" executable is used for all sandboxed processes on
Windows. That started out as plug-ins, but now includes web renderers.

So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's
rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs
because it's the thing rendering those tabs.

It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there
are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable
name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various
things for users....

On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much
saner...

~~~
dblohm7
Actually we only use plugin-container for NPAPI on Windows. I believe that
MacOS was specifically the platform where we ran into problems.

~~~
bzbarsky
Thank you for the correction!

------
bobbyi_settv
I love that we continue to refer to private/ incognito browsing as something
mainly used "when you’re planning a surprise party or gift".

~~~
tomatotomato37
My main use of incognito mode is to prevent my YouTube recommendations from
being filled with music videos or fringe news bullshit

~~~
mirrorlake
I’m saddened by this aspect of YouTube whereby you’re afraid to explore the
site without tanking your recommendations. I wish there was a site that
focused on finding YouTube videos in a more focused way rather than some rogue
ML algorithm that decides to spam you with weird topics. I don’t feel like I
have any control over my YouTube account anymore.

~~~
kkarakk
Sadly this feeling is only going to get more common

------
fedups
> Searching within Multiple Tabs – Did you know that if you enter a ‘%’ in
> your Awesome Bar, you can search the tabs on your computer?

This will be a big help for me. Makes me wonder how many more there are that
are just too cumbersome to discover.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
You know the other modifiers for history (^), favourites (*), and tag search
(+), page title (#), url($), and suggestions (?) too.

I use the first 3, they compound too (in a slightly strange way,
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-
fire...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-firefox-
bookmarks-history-tabs), see last few paras.).

~~~
nh2
After wondering why this doesn't work:

It's important that you type them AFTER the thing to search for, not before.

For example, `mytag +` instead of `+ mytag`.

I found that quite surprising.

~~~
rhizome
Reverse Mozilla Notation

------
SpaceManNabs
Honestly, Reader Mode, in built ad blocker, tree tabs, and containers make
Firefox so streamlined for me.

I think that Google sites must not be thoroughly tested on firefox though!
Vanilla Gmail (no add-ons or theme, but not the basic HTML version) isn't too
fast. Not as fast as it used to be a year ago on Chrome either, but not as bad
as FF.

~~~
krageon
I haven't tried this with gmail yet, but I know that if you use a user agent
switcher on the google search page to set your useragent to chrome the search
page will have more features (summaries, etc). This is especially noticeable
on mobile, where Chrome will have a ton more legibility (IMO) unless you do
this.

It's always been a little surprising that this isn't grounds for a huge fine,
but apparently they get away with it by saying something vague and corporate
like "we can't be sure this works".

------
swebs
Whenever Firefox is automatically updated through my package manager, any open
instances refuse to load any new pages or tabs until I restart Firefox .
Needless to say, this is absolutely infuriating when I'm in the middle of
something important. Does anyone know how to disable this feature?

~~~
philg_jr
Couple things.

1\. Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? I dunno, I
use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the
system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update. 2\. Firefox has a
pretty reliable "Restore Previous Session" feature that works well. I have
also been known to throw a SIGTERM at Firefox and just let it prompt me when I
start it again for the "Something went wrong, should we restore your
session?". Seems to always work for me.

~~~
swebs
>Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app?

Updates are automatic every day.

>I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the
system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update

How often does that happen? It doesn't seem reasonable to put off security
updates that have already been fixed and are simply waiting to install.

Firefox is the only program I've run into where automatic updates have led to
a negative experience. Every single other program handles them just fine.

~~~
johncolanduoni
The reason it’s different is that it (like Chromium) runs a multi-process
sandbox to try to isolate your system from vulnerabilities in the JS runtime
or renderer. It’s possible to handle updates while new tabs are created
gracefully in that case, but far from trivial.

------
an4rchy
Does this include Netflix? It's been getting really annoying to have random
videos your mouse is on, as you scroll, start playing automatically.

~~~
ghostly_s
I've pretty much entirely gone back to pirating because of those fucking auto-
play trailers they have now (and this is on the Roku app, where Firefox wont'
help me).

~~~
asdff
Looking for a specific thing is such a pain. Is it on netflix? Nope. 2 minutes
loading the prime video app. Is it on there? Yeah, 3.99 for the privilege of
streaming for a couple days. 2 minutes checking hulu. Nope. 2 minutes loading
the HBOGO app. Not there either. Turns out, it was on showtime, the one
service I don't have access to.

If its not there I'll pirate without hesitation. The only inconvenience is the
time it takes to drag my laptop to the HDMI cable on the TV.

~~~
technobabble
[https://www.justwatch.com/](https://www.justwatch.com/)

I use it on occasion instead of doing the 2 minute search dance.

------
k_sze
This bit is also somewhat surprising/interesting:

> Improved performance and reduced crash rates by [doubling web content
> loading processes from 4 to 8 [1]

From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not
less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency. I think there's supposed to be
a link to more explanation or the relevant ticket, but it looks like they
forgot to actually add the link. Can somebody fill it in here?

~~~
xtreak29
[http://www.erahm.org/2019/03/13/doubling-the-number-of-
conte...](http://www.erahm.org/2019/03/13/doubling-the-number-of-content-
processes-in-firefox/)

~~~
onli
That does not really explain why it would be more stable, or did I miss it?

~~~
jamienicol
Increasing the number of processes decreases the number of tabs sharing each
process. So if a process crashes it will bring down fewer tabs.

~~~
k_sze
That would mean _smaller_ impact per crash, not _fewer_ crashes though.

~~~
jamienicol
Yes, technically. But the user experience is fewer tabs crashing, which I'd
argue is what user's care about. You notice a crash because of the tab's "oh
no" screen, not by watching `ps`.

~~~
k_sze
I see. That starts to make sense if you explain it that way. Users who don't
think about the multiprocessing model will just see fewer dead tabs when a FF
process crashes, and that could feel like "fewer crashes".

~~~
Sharlin
Which is to say, about 99.9% of them. "Crash" in common parlance is understood
to mean a _glitch_ , that is, user-visible unintended behavior. If fewer user
tabs glitch in that way, that means fewer crashes. User experience is what
matters first and foremost.

------
pluc
Gotta love the constant battle between marketing and common sense. We
implement something, marketing learns of it, abuses it, we tweak or kill the
thing into a pale shadow of its former self.

This is also why we can't have nice things by the way.

------
tzhenghao
I think the core problem is still tab clutter. Every time I hop onto my iPad
to do some light browsing, I have less anxiety. I don't keep many tabs open on
mobile/tablet, but I'm already counting 8 opened here as I'm typing on my
laptop.

Sure, almost everything mentioned in the article is problematic. Then again,
maybe it's just us programmed to hit Ctrl-T too much over a decade...

~~~
basch
There needs to be a complete overhaul of "how i got here, back/forward, where
i want to go, things i want to read, things i want to flip between, things i
want cached so when i click they dont load, i want to purge the tab from my
current workspace, i want to purge this site from the history."

Navigation (forward/back), history, tabs, bookmarks et all are all trying to
do various forms of the same thing, and their overall relationship to each
other is fundamentally broken, because each individual component is too
rigidly defined and isolated.

I should be able to click between a couple buttons to see how tabs are 1)
related to each other from a time/clicked/navigation history perspective 2)
workspace perspective 3) topic perspective

~~~
PaulHoule
Even in current browsers you can do pretty well closing tabs whenever you want
and looking them up in history. The situation could be way better.

~~~
tokyodude
I can't use history unless the browser searched by page content not just title

~~~
rhizome
Exactly. Trying to find something you saw last week? Just sort "by date and
site" and scroll down to its page title!

This kind of thing is why I leave tabs up.

------
jorvi
I wish they made the macOS version more of a priority. There are two bugs in
Bugzilla (window doesn't use CoreAnimation[1], h264/video isn't properly
accelerated since quantum[2]) that together cut battery life in half compared
to using Chrome or Safari. These have been in there for two years (!) and have
varingly been either priority 2 or fix-optional (!!). I understand that there
are limited resources but making your browser nigh unusable for on-the-go
should mean these bugs get priority 1 or priority critical.

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

[2]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1400787#c4](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1400787#c4)

~~~
mbrumlow
No. Linux should always be the priority!!

Let the war begin!!

------
Jabbermonkey
If Firefox had treated TabMixPlus (TMP) and other extensions as first-class
citizens when they introduced quantum, I can guarantee I'd be using Firefox
today (along with all the less technical people in my extended network, who
I'd install it for).

Unfortunately, during the transition to quantum and WebExtensions the
developers blocked add-ons making changes to the Firefox interface, which
crippled TMP and a variety of other add-ons. To suddenly have your favorite
add-on crippled is a little painful but what made me walk away was the tone of
responses from Mozilla people on the boards and the bug reports. It ranged
from dismissive, to arrogant, to angry which, particularly given how quickly
the transition took place, just added insult to injury.

It seemed like Mozilla did get the message by the end of 2017 that their
approach and response to add-ons had alienated many users. One of their 2018
visions included a statement that 'In 2018, extensions will be one of the
reasons why people choose and use Firefox.' Unfortunately, when I looked at
the TMP message boards last year I still saw very little in the way of signs
of cooperation and encouragement from Mozilla. The TMP developer, onemen,
still seems to be trying his best to produce a suite of extensions to
reproduce the lost functionality and to be fair to Mozilla they have been
moving obstacles out of the way but the pace is glacial.

Chrome may be creepy and invasive but right now it's far more flexible and
remains a smoother experience. I'd really love to switch away from Chrome but
I won't trade it for an inflexible Firefox UI. If Mozilla could loosen up on
the UI restrictions, demonstrate that they're doing everything possible to
make the product friendly for add-on developers, and somehow get themselves
around to replicating, or helping to replicate, TMP and other crippled add-ons
then I would enthusiastically consider switching.

~~~
roca
The XUL "let you do anything you want to the browser UI DOM" extensions model
had to die in order to solve a host of problems, most importantly Firefox
performance issues. If that had happened later than it did, Mozilla would be
in a much worse position now.

The real failure was that WebExtensions should have been started several years
earlier, but for various reasons that can was kicked down the road. That is an
interesting untold story.

~~~
Jabbermonkey
That's a fair assessment.

------
karolist
I'm using Mac OS and the scroll using conventional optical mouse with
segmented wheel is really jumpy basically in every other browser. Out of the
Firefox, Chrome and Safari only FF scrolls a page really smooth, with no micro
jumping as I turn the wheel. Anyone know how to fix this in other browsers?

~~~
rplnt
There's two things to this. One is an option usually called "smooth scrolling"
which was historically disabled in Firefox or Chrome (and it was really
annoying). It was an on/off switch that either animated the movement between
two points in page or it just jumped. I believe all browsers have this enabled
now.

The second issue, what you are probably referring to is how the page is
animated between those two points. Firefox now uses something old Opera used
to have, a really gradual scroll. All chromium-based browser I just tried have
this rather jumpy scroll. It's different, but it is not nearly as bad as it
used to be in FF.

In short, I don't know, but "smooth scrolling" is something you might want to
search for.

------
sercand
I have been using Firefox on macOS for a while but firefox is not well-
integrated with the OS. Scrolling, downloading files, playing video/audio and
many more have different convention from Safari/Chrome. Also, I am trying to
avoid using Firefox on battery because it is a killer.

~~~
yogthos
I've been using FF on macOS for the past year and haven't noticed any problems
with the battery. I'm not sure what the problems are with scrolling,
downloading, or playing media are either to be honest.

~~~
sercand
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=909760](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=909760)
and
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1104146](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1104146)
are the issues for downloading which are 4 and 6 years old.

Chrome and Safari support keyboard multimedia keys to play/pause video and
audio which firefox does not. Picture in Picture is not available on Firefox.

Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not
follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.

[https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-
for-2019.html](https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html)
mentions about excessive power consumption on webrender.

~~~
Improvotter
> Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not
> follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.

I find this hugely annoying as well on MacOS when using the touchpad. This is
also the reason why I stick to iOS instead of going for Android. All of these
details are great on my laptop and phone, though they're not what I really
need on my desktop.

------
DeusExMachina
> Added basic support for macOS Touch Bar

This was actually one of my major annoyances, since I use this feature often.
I'm glad they added it, chances are others use it too.

~~~
duxup
Silly question... what do you do with Firefox and the touch bar?

~~~
liveoneggs
I use it to accidentally mute my computer and accidentally cancel loading web
pages.

~~~
asark
I've had to remove a lot of the stuff from mine because, turns out, when I hit
certain modifier'd key combos with my left hand I tend to rest my right ring
finger at the top of one of the number keys... close enough to the touchbar to
trigger it. Didn't know that about myself, but now I do, and I've had to clear
out about half my touchbar to keep it from being a problem. Turns out if you
press "play/pause" on there, it opens iTunes. Took me a while to figure out
why that kept opening for "no reason".

~~~
beirut_bootleg
Gotta love users working around selling points. Now what could that say,
Apple? Could it be?! No! The users are doing it wrong.

~~~
asark
Yeah, it's been a net-negative for me. I never use it for touchbary-stuff (I
don't even know why I would) and it's worse than real buttons for everything
else. The fingerprint reader's OK I guess but is far enough out of the way
that it's barely faster than typing my password—it needs to be toward the
bottom. I think the whole thing would have made more sense as an iOS/watchOS
companion app for MacBooks. Would have addressed the "so... what do I do if I
get used to touchbar stuff then am using an external keyboard for a while?"
Though I'd probably still not have used it.

------
skykooler
"System title bar is hidden by default to match Gnome guideline for Linux
users" \- which part of the UI does this refer to exactly? Does this mean that
Firefox will now be hiding the page title?

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Odd, Firefox 65 already appears to do this under Gnome, unless I'm
misunderstanding.

Could be that Ubuntu were already doing this and it has now made it upstream,
I suppose.

~~~
jcranberry
I believe it's non-default behavior. There's a keyboard shortcut to hide it.

------
jordanpg
Still does not block autoplay on cnn.com, which is my acid test for this.

UPDATE: Yes it does, but it's not enabled by default. (?)

~~~
r3bl
It's not enabled by default immediately, but I've heard it will be in less
than a week.

------
jimmaswell
Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is
left but plain text and ads, to thunderous applause. Gross overreaction after
gross overreaction and now we're in a state where extensions are a shallow
husk of their former glory, you need to jump through legally vague ridiculous
hoops to do anything involving user data, a vast trove of great Flash content
is no longer accessible to the average user, web apps with sound and video
aren't allowed to work seamlessly without an obnoxious "click here to let the
webpage do what it should be able to do anyway" button, and various other
unnecessary restrictions. How soon until it's the default that you need to
give a website permission to display images and you need a license to make a
webpage? That's the direction it feels like we're heading in. I'm saddened
that the golden age of the web is probably behind me, but at least I was alive
for it.

I went over the subject here too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332)

~~~
benj111
Staying on the subject at hand, do you not find it annoying trying to find
which tab, and where on the tab a video is playing?

"I'm saddened that the golden age of the web is probably behind me"

Funny, I'd place the golden age before all these things you cite.

Out of curiosity what's your favourite website, what most sums up your golden
age?

~~~
jimmaswell
I'm not sure if I'd call it my favorite anymore but I probably use reddit the
most.

I'm thinking of golden age in terms of the power available to
webpages/browsers. This would be when HTML5/webgl/etc features had just gotten
implemented, plugins like Flash and Java were still supported, and Firefox
used the old extension system. All of the old web was still there alongside
the cool new stuff. Now the old stuff is gone and the new stuff is getting
ruined.

~~~
benj111
Reddit, I can see that.

Would you want a reddit where every embedded video in a thread auto played
though?

I'm guessing our disagreement is over who has final say over display of
content? I would say the client, you would say the server (or creator)? Is
that fair?

~~~
jimmaswell
The user should be able to make the client do whatever they want, but a
blacklist for autoplay sounds a lot better to me than a whitelist. It harms
the creative potential of things when they're limited by default and most
users aren't going to manually add your site to a whitelist. It wouldn't even
be so bad if the website could just request autoplay permissions the same as
it requests permission to know your location etc. Better would be if the
browser heuristically detected the site potentially abusing autoplay and then
asked the user if they want to block the site from doing so in the future - at
least giving webpages a chance by default instead of being guilty until proven
innocent. As a web user I've never been so bothered by autoplaying news videos
etc. that I felt it would be fair to stick a wrench in the entire web over
them.

On the subject of Reddit I do find it unnecessarily burdensome that I have to
give Reddit Enhancement Suite permission for every individual domain that it
wants to embed stuff from, another place where I feel like browsers went too
far locking themselves down.

~~~
benj111
What about banning autoplay on background tabs, with a blacklist for abusers
on the focused tab?

The problem with blacklists is that they default to letting bad things through
if not maintained. But yeah it would be nice to think that we still have a web
where the blacklist would be less unwieldy than the whitelist.

------
ddavis
On macOS: still waiting for interactions with the address bar to be smooth and
fast. It's frustratingly laggy in my opinion. Does anyone else feel this way?
For me it's the only reason I still gravitate towards Chrome on a Mac.

~~~
abrowne
AIUI, Mozilla is rewriting the address bar ("QuantumBar"), and you can now
toggle it on in Nightly by setting browser.urlbar.quantumbar to true in
about:config. I've only tried it on Linux, but it seems smoother.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
When did the "Awesome Bar" become the "Quantum Bar", what's the difference,
and why can't they call it the "address bar" (yes despite it being overloaded
with other functions)?

~~~
abrowne
It's this rewrite specifically that's called QuantumBar.

------
OscarTheGrinch
Firefox needs to be the browser OF something, something super simple: privacy,
security, convenience, etc. "Reduce Your Online Annoyances" is a bit of a
mouthful. Being the browser of "Support Us Or Google Will Own Everything" is
likewise not compelling for the vast majority of users.

Firefox has the functionality, now it needs to cement its narrative.

~~~
bertil
“Firefox, the browser without shitware”?

~~~
clb4mf
They run ads on the front page and install addons remotely into their users'
computers. They are everything but "without shitware".

~~~
pard68
Huh? Examples or some sources would be appreciated.

------
arwineap
I would love a browser, or extension that would prevent sites from hijacking
or munging my clipboard.

It's infuriating that a page can dictate what gets placed in my clipboard
against my will.

~~~
driverdan
There's a setting in about:config to turn it off. The problem is that it
messes up copying text in some tools like Google Docs and Sheets. Even if you
turn it off Google hijacks the shortcut keys and right click. For some reason
selecting Copy from the Edit menu doesn't work either.

~~~
codazoda
Do you know what the option is called?

~~~
ilikejam
dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled

------
k_sze
Not sure if the tab search is entirely new or simply made more accessible in
FF 66, but it certainly seems to make the All Tabs Helper add-on mostly
obsolete for me now.

~~~
Woofles
In previous versions if you typed in the name of tab in the url bar it would
offer you the option of a tab you already had open (on any of your computers
using FF sync) among the search options.

------
Jnr
Once Firefox will be able to handle
[https://theannoyingsite.com/](https://theannoyingsite.com/) properly, it will
have achieved that. (I suggest opening the most annoying site in incognito
mode.)

I had to tweak my Firefox quite a lot to pass that "benchmark".

------
benol
Considering the recent "Spectre is here to stay" paper [1], can anyone comment
on whether Firefox should be considered secure until the work on process-per-
site lands (I believe they are working on it)?

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178)

~~~
hannob
> can anyone comment on whether Firefox should be considered secure until the
> work on process-per-site lands

No and Yes.

No, theoretically there could be spectre vulns. Practically we have seen zero
spectre-based attacks in the wild. It's not a big deal.

------
vinay_ys
These are the features still on my wishlist: \- First-class portable password
manager and built-in support for pkcs11 SC \- security device that's not
buggy, \- fingerprinting protection, \- first party isolation, \- default
fonts, \- better zoom behavior, \- built-in ublock origin ad-blocker.

------
davnicwil
So what's the list of browsers now that have autoplaying blocked or have that
feature planned?

~~~
mental1896
I've started to make a list:

\- Firefox -

~~~
tsukurimashou
Lynx :^)

~~~
swebs
w3m

------
skrebbel
My company makes pluggable chat software. I'm sad about this development,
because it means that we can't audibly notify users anymore when someone
writes a message to them.

I wonder whether there's a way around that, but I don't see it.

~~~
Someone1234
Some of your competitors have been using it for a fake "ding" sound and a
generic message when you visit a site. So while I sympathize a little, it is
for the greater good.

~~~
skrebbel
True! That really sucks.

I was thinking something like a browser could allow audio in response to, say,
a push notification (akin to how they allow popups to be created after user
click events) but that'd be easily gameable for the situation you describe.
There's no way a browser can distinguish between a legitimate message from a
human and robospam.

Thanks for the clarification.

------
Aardwolf
Is there a whitelist though? Because while I dislike an unexpected video
autoplaying in a news article, there are sites where I want and expect a video
to start without pressing anything, such as Youtube

~~~
Someone1234
Yes.

Options -> Privacy & Security -> Block Websites from automatically playing
sound -> Exceptions (Allow/Block)

------
Leace
I wonder how was the Wayland support improved. I'm running Firefox 65 with
GTK_BACKEND=wayland and it works quite well but there are still some minor
issues where and there.

------
rammy1234
"Lowered priority of setTimeout and setInterval during page load to improve
overall page load performance" , how will this improve performane? im askin to
learn .

------
cyxxon
One web annoyance I have recently discovered is moving the current tab. So far
only one website I know uses it, but that is really annoying... when you click
on specific links on that site, it suddenly moves the ative tab to the very
right of all open tabs. I don't understand the reasoning there, but it made me
ponder learning Firefox addon development several times already... or is
something like that also easily fixed in Firefox?

------
acheron
This should help for a few months, and then web developers will come up with
some other terrible anti-pattern, and we will need yet another line of
defense.

------
sterlind
Oh thank God, Windows hello support. I had to give up Firefox at work because
all our sites authenticate via Hello. Now I can kick Chrome to the curb.

------
14
I love the page anchoring there is nothing more annoying, imo, then page
jumping. More so on mobile but still am glad to see this addressed. I always
felt like it was intentional on mobile, timed perfectly to when the average
user would be expected to click the certain location then bam an ad pops up in
it's place. Good riddance.

------
seanwilson
> Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the
> top of the page

How well does this work in practice?

------
Causality1
One of my primary online annoyances is having to maintain two Firefox
installations because most of my favored extensions can't or won't be
rewritten for WebExtensions and I find the practice of forcing users to keep
currently open tabs above the bookmarks bar contemptuous.

------
rosege
This it's great and I'm looking forward to trying it. I'm currently in Europe
and every webpage now pops up a message about using cookies. If they could
work out a way to say accept to all these automatically too that would be
awesome as well.

~~~
dorgo
There is an addon for firefox: "i don't care about cookies" which removes such
popups. I think it works well, because I can't remember cookie-popups on
desktop.

~~~
the_pwner224
The IDCAC extension just has a filter list for cookie popups and removes them
the same way that ad blockers do.

In the uBlock Origin settings you can go to the 'Filter lists' tab and enable
more filter lists, including ones that delete cookie popups.

Here are a few good ones:

Built In => uBlock filters - I have enabled all except experimental

Ads => Adblock Warning Removal List (messages asking you to disable adblocker)

Annoyances => Fanboy's Cookie, Annoyance, and Social Blocking Lists (social
blocking deletes like/share buttons)

------
riquito
> The min-content and max-content keywords are now available unprefixed

very good, thanks for the hard work!

------
rc_kas
Firefox : The hero the world does not deserve

~~~
Longhanks
But desperately needs.

------
mamon
When will they get rid of their own biggest annoyance, namely this "Firefox is
installing updates and will start in a moment" popup? Why not install updates
just before shutting down? Or be decent and ask user permission ?

------
copperx
This is a great update. However, it still doesn't fix the long-standing
YouTube micro-stutters on Linux. I have to resort to using Chrome to watch any
videos, and I have tried all the workarounds.

------
laszlokorte
Does anyone else have the problem that firefox denies acces to
`navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition` even if the user clicks "allow"?

I hoped it was fixed in the release but seems to be not the case.

~~~
ataylor32
I tried [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation_API#Geolocation_Live_Example) in Firefox 66 on
macOS and Windows. I got "Unable to retrieve your location" on macOS (though
it worked in Chrome on macOS). It worked on Windows, though.

~~~
cpeterso
On macOS, does setting about:config "geo.provider.use_corelocation" = false
and restarting Firefox fix the geolocation error? Firefox 65 or 66 recently
changed from always using Google Location Service to first check the operating
system's local location service (CoreLocation on macOS, which might have a
local location cache for faster lookups).

If disabling CoreLocation fixes the problem, you might look in macOS System
Preferences for location permissions. The first time an application tries to
use the local location service, macOS prompts the user to grant permission to
the application. If you accidentally click "deny", then macOS will
automatically deny all future Firefox location requests.

------
51lver
I'd like the option to disable checking for updates back, please.

------
amelius
Why not just block the audio by default?

I don't care about the video, because any hostile website could still generate
video by using gifs, or by playing a sequence of image frames using
JavaScript.

~~~
peterlk
Because breaking sites like Soundcloud and Youtube by default seems like an
overreaction to the abuse of auto-playing sound

~~~
danShumway
This change will already do that; Firefox doesn't whitelist sites by default.

My personal preference would have been to mute tabs by default rather than
blocking autoplay:

\- Sites can't detect a muted tab with JS, so they can't use it for tracking
or block services behind it.

\- Nothing would break. Firefox did a pretty good job of minimizing the
potential breakage from this change, but there are still edge cases and some
weird logic that's required to address them. A muted tab is no different than
you unplugging the speakers from your computer. It'll never cause a Javascript
error.

\- It's simpler from a user perspective. You can already mute a tab. Why do we
need another control that's meant to fulfill the same purpose?

The counter-argument is that blocking autoplay is actually about saving data,
but in reality:

\- The restrictions are trivial to bypass, since you can just start playing
after the first user gesture/action.

\- Muted videos are still allowed to autoplay.

So if you're trying to save data, it would still be a lot better to just have
an option to block audio/video entirely, not just of the autoplaying variety.

As far as I can tell, Mozilla basically got kind of railroaded into this
implementation because that's what Google did, and that set the general
narrative. Mozilla ended up with a _better_ implementation than Google, but
this is still one of those restrictions where I feel like 2-3 years from now
we're going to look back and say, "yeah, this wasn't really thought through
all the way."

------
OrgNet
They should also block sites that load data from more then 3 sources ... that
would almost be the whole web... too bad mozilla doesnt have a large market
share anymore...

------
daniel_iversen
That’s all nice but is there any update on battery improvements? I can’t see
any for a long time. That’s about the last reason left why I’m still using
Chrome on Mac.

~~~
tgtweak
Edge spent a lot of time and focus on this but it seems Firefox is not
actively pursuing it or marketing it.

Been using Firefox nightly on Android and it's on par with chrome (even faster
with ublock running since FF can run extensions on mobile), but the battery
drain feels higher than with chrome.

------
undoware
Could someone in the know please dilate on this claim?

"Fixed: <button> element is no longer special cased in event dispatch, per
latest specifications"

~~~
heycam
It's probably referring to this bug:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1089326](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1089326)

------
fauigerzigerk
Firefox has so many great features and yet I find myself not using it as my
main browser for a simple reason: New windows open twice as fast in Safari and
Chrome.

I'm opening a lot of windows because I'm not a fan of tabs. So Firefox feels
extremely sluggish to me even though the actual rendering and JavaScript
execution is anything but sluggish.

I'm not even sure if Firefox windows open so slowly for a reason or if it's
just a really badly designed animation.

------
thecleaner
Hey did anybody try the autoplay off feature with Twitter ? Videos in my feed
still seem to be playing

------
todd3834
If Firefox automatically got rid of cookie banners for me I’d consider
switching back

~~~
jamienicol
This extension will do that for you: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/)

------
superkuh
Firefox also automatically blocks users from installing or editing their own
add-ons.

~~~
51lver
I too find this to be a hostile action against the user. It's my computer.

~~~
dymk
It’s for common-case user security. Use the developer edition if you want to
install unsigned extensions.

------
lvturner
I want to see “disable websites asking to send you notifications on bu
default” !

------
YeahSureWhyNot
please add 'pull down to reload' feature on android browser

~~~
RussianCow
Please don't. Otherwise I'm going to end up accidentally reloading many pages.
:)

------
ancorevard
Is this any different that what Safari has been doing?

~~~
Longhanks
No, but it’s available one Windows and Linux.

------
revskill
My online annoyances mostly come from having too many open tabs. That's why i
use a Chrome add-on (Great Suspender) to automatically kill inactive tabs,
which killed my RAM in a long run.

------
nydel
excited to see some of these features in a future waterfox release; things
like integrated Pocket are the most major annoyances to me.

~~~
pard68
You can turn that off, unless it's just the idea that is annoying can't turn
that off I guess.

------
syntaxing
Finally! Please roll this out to Firefox Android!

------
fxfan
Now please ship ublock origin by default.

~~~
0xffff2
Why? What would be better about uBlock Origin if it was integrated?
Furthermore, it wasn't that long ago that we all used AdBlock Plus, and then
uBlock. If we integrate the current flavor of ad blocker, what happens when we
want/need to move to something else?

------
vernie
Didn't the whole creative coding community pitch a fit when Chrome did this?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Because Chrome had bugs in how it worked, and didn't make it trivial for
people to re-enable when they _want_ audio.

~~~
seba_dos1
I wouldn't say "bugs". It was deliberate behavior.

Chrome simply broke a lot of content on the Web, while Firefox just mutes it
and lets you unmute.

------
moogly
[this thread is not for bug reports; sorry everyone]

~~~
pjc50
What? I missed that in the release notes.

~~~
Flavius
Don't worry, you can still move/reorder/detach tabs.

------
jordan_
but how is there still no pinch-to-zoom on mac?

------
clb4mf
[https://i.imgur.com/mzmsdzt.png](https://i.imgur.com/mzmsdzt.png)

They added this to my home page, despite the fact that my default search
provider is DDG.

Mozilla, could you STOP bundling advertisements into my browser?

~~~
kowdermeister
Do you donate to the foundation?

------
ackfoo
Why does it only block videos with sound?

I would like one prominent check box in the settings that says, "Never, ever
auto-play videos. Ever."

I cannot imagine thinking, "You know what this site needs? A video that starts
playing by itself!"

------
jesse_m
Does this mean that custom emacs/vim keybindings can work again?

~~~
rudedogg
I use [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-
ff/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/) and it works
well for me.

~~~
jesse_m
I thought that when only web extension plugins were allowed shortcut
extensions no longer worked. I was using keysnail. I was following
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061)
but didn't know if it had been resolved. Thanks I'll check that out

------
diminish
At the end unless Firefox doesn't block JavaScript, it won't have much effect.

Actually it's also time to ban JavaScript after horrendous front end
frameworks made simple page loads slow, energy and time consuming.

~~~
Bekwnn
I already use noscript. So many websites work at 100% and load 2x as fast with
only 1/3rd of scripts allowed.

~~~
snaky
I wish there were browser extension to exchange the lists of allowed scripts
for sites between the users. So Noscript could automatically preset this for
you and you don't need to tune the list for every site by yourself.

~~~
kadal
I recently discovered that Umatrix has something like this. One of the buttons
gives you the ability to click to enable common subsets e.g. "GitHub" ,
"reCAPTCHA" etc.

------
jimmaswell
Reposting from the other thread:

Slowly but surely the creative potential of the web is eroded until nothing is
left but plain text and ads, to thunderous applause. Gross overreaction after
gross overreaction and now we're in a state where extensions are a shallow
husk of their former glory, you need to jump through legally vague ridiculous
hoops to do anything involving user data, a vast trove of great Flash content
is no longer accessible to the average user, web apps with sound and video
aren't allowed to work seamlessly without an obnoxious "click here to let the
webpage do what it should be able to do anyway" button, and various other
unnecessary restrictions. How soon until it's the default that you need to
give a website permission to display images and you need a license to make a
webpage? That's the direction it feels like we're heading in. I'm saddened
that the golden age of the web is probably behind me, but at least I was alive
for it.

I went over the subject here too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087332)

~~~
mediaman
You're advocating for auto-playing videos and sound, proprietary resource-
gobbling flash content, and the nonconsensual abuse of user data? Yes, what a
golden age that was.

It is a much more persuasive argument that the new controls are simply a
reaction to bad actors who corrupted the value the original web provided.
Sure, when the internet was a smaller village, nobody needed to lock their
door: but then the village turned into the city, and locks became necessary.
It seems strange to blame the locks for the reason they are needed.

~~~
jimmaswell
I find GDPR overreaching enough to be worse than its absence.

~~~
angus-prune
What negative impacts have you seen from GDPR?

------
OrgNet
Its a bit late for this .... not sure if it will make any difference... the
people still using firefox are using addons to do that... but sure its a step
in the right direction

~~~
RussianCow
We need to eradicate this myth that only power users use Firefox anymore.
There are plenty of laypeople still using it that never switched to Chrome, or
recently switched to Firefox for privacy or other reasons, and those people
generally don't use many addons (if any at all) or change the settings from
the defaults. I don't know what the actual percentage is, but I'm sure Mozilla
knows the answer, and I'd be willing to bet that it's much more than half.

~~~
burtonator
So far I'm seeing very few people using my app in Firefox... they're mostly
chrome. By about 80%... and a ton are from Hacker News... Makes it hard to
justify coding for Firefox but I'm trying.

~~~
pacifika
RIP IE6

------
ekianjo
Looking at the news cycle, it seems like the amount of changes is pretty low
for this new version. Are they using version numbers for marketing purposes
now?

~~~
Tomte
They have time-based releases.

~~~
ekianjo
Ok I was not aware of that. Has it always been the case?

~~~
kevin_b_er
After chrome started a policy of version number inflation, firefox, firefox
did the same for marketing reasons, else'd we'd be on like... version 6.6
instead of 66.0

~~~
anticensor
No, it would be 5.10. Because, 1 to 4 are non-rapid releases, 5 would be the
Servo epoch.

