
Firefox 71 - AdmiralAsshat
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/71.0/releasenotes/
======
pcx
Great to see Mozilla consistently improving devtools in Firefox. I have been
using them over Chrome for a while now, hope it gets to a place where most
devs start using FF again for debugging web apps.

~~~
cm-t
I agree, devtools are getting better. By the way , I recommmend developpers to
use the developper edition
[https://www.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/developer/](https://www.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/developer/)

~~~
johnward
What is the difference? I just thought it was basically a dark theme.

~~~
addicted44
They have some experimental features enabled there which they don't in other
channels.

For example, I'm running Nightly, and the Dev Tools>What's New tab says the
"Debug Variables with Watchpoints" (break when a property is read/written)
feature is in Developer Edition (and presumably not in Nightly or the Release
channel).

------
telegrammae
Firefox is wonderful! Still hoping for much-needed general UI improvements,
though. The tabs look bulky and have animation performance issues. The
bookmarks manager is outdated and inconsistent with other tools in its look.
Same with the downloads manager. All these things aren't a big deal, but
Safari and Chrome seem to have a more pleasant overall graphic design.

~~~
olah_1
> The tabs look bulky and have animation performance issues.

The fact that the tabs don't shrink, but instead slide out of view is
infuriating. Something like this affects users constantly.

~~~
bzbarsky
The shrinking behavior infuriates a lot of people too, by making it impossible
to find the tab you want. That's my experience with Chrome, at least.

Setting the "browser.tabs.tabMinWidth" preference to 0 in Firefox will let the
tabs shrink down fairly small (to just the favicon and maybe one letter of the
title). If you want the tabs to shrink even more than that, I'd like to
understand why, other than "it's what I'm used to". Which, to be clear, is a
perfectly valid reason to want something!

~~~
olah_1
There should really just be a "Chrome" config template for Firefox for people
that prefer Chrome UX and styling.

But in general, it's very upsetting that Firefox doesn't actively support
editing these user setting fields.

My experience was that if you changed even a single boolean value, the answer
to every support question was "reset to default settings and see if it's still
broken". Just awful.

------
qxnqd
>Native MP3 decoding on Windows, Linux, and macOS

What does "native" mean in this context? Uses accelerated CPU instructions?
Uses the codecs of the system instead of something Firefox has built-in?

~~~
techntoke
Now if they could focus on native video decoding in Linux, something that
actually works with Chromium and leads me to believe that Chromium developers
are more committed to open source.

~~~
MrRadar
Mozilla are working on a "Wayland DMABuf" feature which will allow for
separate processes to share GPU buffers on Linux[1]. For a long time that has
been a blocker for hardware-accelerated video decoding as otherwise the data
would need to be copied GPU->CPU->GPU which would negate a large portion of
the gains. In the short term the work will only apply to WebGL rendering but
it should open the door to hardware-accelerated video decoding in the near
future.

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572697](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572697)

~~~
nominated1
I’m hoping Mozilla will move to libplacebo [1] when it’s stable. It’s seems
the most promising.

[1]
[https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo](https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo)

------
portmanteaufu
I've been shocked by how helpful the new Picture-in-Picture feature is. I wish
the pop-out brought the full set of playback controls with it, but it's still
far superior to making a full-blown window for video playback.

~~~
dickeytk
I want to try it, but it’s windows-only right now I think

~~~
nkrisc
It is, so they say. They said it should be coming to macOS and Linux in
Janurary 2020.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/12/03/news-from-
firefox-o...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/12/03/news-from-firefox-on-
mobile-private-network-and-desktop/#PiP)

~~~
ihuman
Its in 71 on macOS (and maybe Linux), but its disabled by default. In
about:config, search for picture-in-picture, and enable everything except for
always-show (unless you want that). If you right-click a video, there will be
a new picture-in-picture option. For Youtube, you need to double-right-click
to bring up Firefox's right-click menu.

~~~
snailmailman
Can confirm that these options exist and appear to work in linux, at least for
me. (ubuntu 16.04) And im still on v70, so i guess its been there for a little
while at least.

------
psim1
FF still causes considerable grief on my wife’s Windows 10 laptop. Two hour
battery life is not acceptable. MS Edge (spit) more than triples that battery
life.

------
polymorph1sm
I switch to Firefox few months ago on macOS and Linux. Other than issues on
Youtube video playback ( sometimes the frame just freeze when I switch between
different workspace in macOS )and a few minor bugs across google's service the
overall experience is mostly on par with Chrome.

------
bluenose69
I'll update, because that's the sensible thing to do. But, frankly, I only use
FF because the Zotero plugin works in it, but not in Safari.

And I tend to load FF, use it for a few minutes, and then quit it. That's
because FF has a habit of going nuts somehow, and gulping energy on my OSX
systems. I've no idea what causes the problem, and I don't really care,
because Safari tends to be faster -- sometimes a lot faster.

~~~
MrRadar
Regarding the energy use, give 71 a try. It includes compositor enhancements
(actually included in the last release) that should significantly reduce
energy use on modern macOS:
[https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-
red...](https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-reduced-
power-usage-in-firefox-70-on-macos-with-core-animation/)

------
benologist
Looking forward to this update hijacking my browsing and demanding a restart
instead of just waiting for me to close the browser.

------
weinzierl
I'm happy to see subgrid land and I hope Chrome will catch up soon.

