
Firefox 62.0 Released - l2dy
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/62.0/releasenotes/
======
bovine3dom
Coinciding with this release, Firefox 52 ESR is no longer supported, so no
supported versions of Firefox support the legacy extensions.

I'm mentioning this here just so I can tell Vimperator / Pentadactyl / VimFx
users that there are loads of options you can replace your old extensions
with, some of which are... okay.

Links follow in increasing order of user-friendliness:

[https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl](https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl)
[^]

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_f...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_ff/)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-
vixen/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-
ff/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/)

[^] Disclaimer: I develop this one. If you've tried it before in the past, now
might be a good time to try it again. We've just pushed out a release that
moved quite a lot of code around, hopefully eliminating a whole class of bugs,
especially relating to ignore mode and multiple windows.

~~~
polkadotted
Thank you for your work. I'm currently a tridactyl user. However I'd like to
point out that _none_ of these replacements can currently compete with the
previous extensions in term of usability.

Simply put, you cannot count on the keyboard shortcuts to work consistently
throughout Firefox. They do not work in built-in pages (such as errors). They
do not work when inside an input field in GTK. There's no way to consistently
override built-in FF shortcuts that simply get in the way.

It's pretty sad for users which expect the keyboard experience to be
consistent. I now mostly use FF's own shortcuts for most of the tab-management
actions, since those are the only ones that work _most_ of the time when an
error page is generated.

~~~
PurpleRamen
Worse is the unreliable working of vi-keys. Often enough focus ends somewhere
on the page, and the vi-extension just stops working. I've yet to find a
reliable way to gain input-focus again in those cases.

~~~
bovine3dom
Sometimes this is our fault - there's a bug with our command line where it
doesn't close properly and can steal focus (particularly `tabopen
about:addons`). I am sorry about that. We're working on tearing it out and
starting again as the command line has lots of problems.

Otherwise, it's usually YouTube. I just only interact with the videos using
the mouse (or MPV via `;v`) and make sure to click outside them afterwards.

I do have a trackpoint on all of my keyboards, so I don't really notice having
to click the mouse because it's just another keyboard button, so I might not
be the most representative person here.

~~~
PurpleRamen
I don't think it's just that bug. I have a userstyle to mark the displayed
element, so I sometimes see when something is grabing the focus, and neither
tab nor ESC or Alt-l helps in those cases. But after some reseach I found out
F6 can help there. Till now I thought it's just the same as Alt-l and only
focus the addressbar, but turns out it can also unfocus it and switch focus
between the different areas of firefox. I tested it in the last hour and it
really worked in several cases where I was stuck in focus-hell.

------
phakding
With all these posters complaining, am I the only one who is totally satisfied
with Firefox? I never had many issues using firefox. I did use Chrome briefly,
but came back to firefox. If it matters, I mostly use firefox on Debian Linux
and am also not a web developer.

~~~
coffeefirst
I keep trying to switch. The thing that stops me is it chokes on big single
page apps. Arguably the problem is the sites being choked on (too much
javascript) but there's not much I can do about that.

~~~
phakding
What would be an example of a "big single page app"?

~~~
driverdan
Google Calendar crushes FF for me. I can't leave it open very long or it slows
down FF, eats CPU cycles, and drains my battery.

~~~
grumblestumble
If you're on OSX and not using the "default for display" resolution, that may
be the cause of the issue. Don't have the bugzilla handy, but I stumbled
across it at one point and confirmed that that was the culprit for me.
Unfortunately, I'm unwilling to use default display res, so I'm hoping that
gets fixed soon. Would love to standardize on Firefox for my every day
browsing.

~~~
dao-
> Don't have the bugzilla handy

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

------
nathcd
> Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored
> descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html
> or json files, as they will be removed in a future release.

Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between
removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're
paring down user-facing features.

I don't think these are the features being referred to when people complain
about "browser bloat", Mozilla. I expect Chrome to push me to use remote
services, but I don't want that from Mozilla. I know it's a trope to complain
about Firefox becoming a Chrome clone, but it feels truer every release.

~~~
jaas
The Firefox bookmarking implementation is unnecessarily complicated and I'm
guessing very few features are actually used. It's a maintenance burden, I'm
not surprised they want to slim it down.

To give you an example of a maintenance burden in the bookmarking system, the
bookmarking system uses a bunch of synchronous APIs. Mozilla is trying to cut
down or eliminate use of those APIs, to reduce UI hangs among other reasons,
and in order to do that a bunch of bookmarking code needs to be rewritten.

You may have decided that you don't care about this particular kind of bloat,
but all unnecessary maintenance burdens distract developers from doing work
I'm sure you do care about.

Here is the bug for removing descriptions:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890)

Here is a sub-bug that discusses issues with synchronous APIs.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1467996](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1467996)

~~~
snaky
The relevant comment from Bugzilla thread

> Nonetheless, I'd argue that it's a matter of PR among the subset of users
> most likely to champion Firefox.

> When the reading list functionality just vanished on me one day and I rushed
> to make a backup of reading-list.sqlite in case it got deleted later, it did
> not leave me with a very good impression of Mozilla. (rather than, for
> example, seeing that it had been migrated to a folder in the bookmarks
> store.)

> (In fact, I'm currently working on an external utility, to be integrated via
> WebExtensions, to store all persistent state which I don't feel I can trust
> Firefox to preserve when 52 ESR drops away. This approach to retiring
> bookmark descriptions only leaves me feeling more justified in the view that
> I can't trust Mozilla with my data.)

~~~
StillBored
Add to that rant the fact that for a while mozjs was the choice javascript
engine for various projects that wanted a JS interpreter. Then one day they
decided to literally break the API, every couple weeks, and its been going on
for years. The language bindings aren't even the same now, and projects like
gnome end up with these rather large patch sets every few months just to keep
up.

~~~
bzbarsky
mozjs was a pretty old codebase with some design decisions that made sense in
the mid-90s but don't make sense now baked into the API.

The API needed to change to support things like a generational garbage
collector. The set of needed API changes was quite large.

Now the project had two options: Make the changes incrementally or all at
once. The incremental option would mean API changes with each release until
all the changes got made. The all at once option would mean you'd need to do a
complete rewrite of all the relevant mozjs code and all the relevant Firefox
code all landing in a single release. Since the time needed for that rewrite
was measured in years, that would mean maintaining a branch and dealing with
all the merge conflicts from other ongoing work. In practice, it would have
meant a much slower pace of web-facing JS feature development at best; more
likely a complete stop to that.

Given those choices, the JS team went for the incremental route. Yes, it was
painful for API consumers who needed to be running against current versions.
But in this case, I expect it was the right tradeoff.

I should also note that V8 breaks API compat regularly, though not to the
extent that SpiderMonkey had to, due to being designed 15 years later with
many benefits of hindsight.

[Disclosure: I work on Firefox, closely with the JS team but not on the JS
team.]

------
bratao
I'm a die-hard Firefox fan. While all my colleagues develop in Chrome, I'm the
weird one who uses Firefox and always catches some problem in rendering when
testing.

But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have
an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have
no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use
case.

~~~
zbraniecki
Hi, dev here. :)

Can you capture a profile using steps from [0] and send them to us/me?

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_qua...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_quantum_is_eating_your_cpu_help_us_debug/)

~~~
mannimow
Thanks for chiming in!

I have a question. Where are you guys at with this issue?

The thing is, literally every retina resolution Macbook I've tried this on (3
different machines) resulted in massive CPU hog with 4 tabs open on a few
basic websites. Let's say they are reddit, hn, and youtube.

The Awesome bar is slow, switching tabs is slow, computer warms up in 15
seconds. Fans kick in, the rest is history. New profile, existing profile, it
doesn't matter.

That goes for every single release after 57, including Developers, Beta, and
Nightly builds.

15 inch ones are worse than 13.

This doesn't happen when I use external screen.

My feeling is in order to reproduce the issue one has to \- Find a Macbook Pro
released after 2012. \- Open Firefox with aforementioned websites \- Try to
interact with the websites

Are there any active issues for it?

I remember this one:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

All dependent bugs are fixed, but alas, it made no difference.

Is there's anything I could do to help resolve this?

------
Aardwolf
"Firefox Home (the default New Tab) now allows users to display up to 4 rows
of top sites, Pocket stories, and highlights"

Yay, I always wanted to see more spam in it!

(had the "fun" experience of needing to figure out again how to disable new
spammy things from new tab page on mobile despite having already done so
before)

~~~
TremendousJudge
...there's a little cog wheel at the top right?

~~~
Karunamon
Defaults matter. Firefox has this annoying habit of constantly devising new
“interesting” things on the new tab page. It’s to the point where you need to
install an add on to override it to avoid constant surprises.

------
nine_k
Not related to this particular release, but I wish Mozilla implemented tree-
style tabs as core feature (or at least provided core API). The current "Tree
style tab" plugin in indispensable for me, but has to be a hack, however
exquisite, especially around tab context menus.

~~~
baby
I'm still baffled at the number of people who have no idea that tree style
tabs exist. If more education was given to people about this plugin, it would
probably be a core feature of Firefox.

~~~
tibu
I have to check this out now. I'm one of those who haven't heard about tree
style tabs until now

------
AdmiralAsshat
Been waiting for “Reopen in Container” for awhile. It's very annoying when I
Ctrl+T to open a new tab for a site and it takes me awhile to realize I forgot
to open it in the right container tab. Glad to see the feature finally added!

~~~
QasimK
Also a huge fan of this feature, I lit up when I read it. I hope there is a
way to turn it into a keyboard shortcut.

------
Flimm
This is the feature I'm most excited about this time:

> “Reopen in Container” tab menu option appears for users with Containers that
> lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container

This is going to make containers even more useful.

~~~
smnrchrds
If you are using containers, New container tab [0] and Switch Container [1]
were essential add-ons. Now with this feature built-in, the latter is
unnecessary.

[0] Add Alt+C shortcut to open a new tab in current container:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-
container...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container-
tab/)

[1] Reopen current tab in container: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/switch-contai...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/switch-container/)

~~~
skykooler
Now all we need is something to let us map shortcuts to open specific
containers, e.g. alt+s to open a new tab in the shopping container. (I tried
using Application Shortcuts on OSX, but a. they stop working after restarting
Firefox and b. they don't work if a tab has full screen video because that
hides Firefox's menu bar on all monitors.)

------
bhauer
When are containers going to graduate to a built-in feature rather than an
extension?

~~~
gsa
Containers used to be the other way around, baked into Firefox and then moved
to an extension last year. It's better that a power user feature is not a part
of the default installation.

~~~
davnicwil
Containers are the killer feature of Firefox over Chrome and the reason I
recommend it to family and friends. In my opinion they're not a power user
feature at all, everyone and anyone can get instant obvious benefit from them.
Multiple logins on the same service, controlling how you are tracked, just to
name a couple.

Attention and effort are expensive and 'install and just use' gets you a
material percentage more users than 'install and then click through this menu
system and install something else'. Containers should absolutely work out the
box.

------
vmsp
I really want to change to Firefox but a while ago it was a huge battery drain
on my mac. It had something to do with it not using CoreAnimation, I think.
Does anyone know if this is still the case?

~~~
fbender
Do you use a Retina display by chance? In certain setups, Fx is known to use
more energy in HiDPI mode. Try disabling it and see if it fixes your issue.

To what I know, this issue is known to Moz and will be fixed in a few versions
(it appears to be a complex issue that takes time to solve).

~~~
toyg
_> In certain setups, Fx is known to use more energy in HiDPI mode. Try
disabling it_

"Hey, your laptop is too good, please cripple it!" is not a good answer,
especially considering retina displays have been out for 6 years now (and I
bet loads of Moz employees use them too).

I use Firefox almost exclusively, and still I wonder, sometimes, what the
%$#%@ the "leadership" is thinking. They keep messing with crap like Pocket
instead of concentrating on fundamentals like these.

~~~
fbender
I was merely pointing out troubleshooting steps, not suggesting you take that
as a solution to the issue. As I said, it‘s been worked on and latest nightly
seems to improve that situation a bit.

------
portaljacker
Why remove descriptions from bookmarks? I know they're not the most useful
thing, but I don't get the benefit of removing them.

~~~
toyg
I suspect it's simply "one less thing to worry about when we sync with the
cloud".

------
clumsysmurf
One thing I still miss from Safari is 'Show all Tabs' which would give you
thumbnails of open tabs. There is nothing built into FireFox that is
equivalent. I have looked at some of the extensions, and they are in various
states of support or waiting for FF to implement some API. The dropdown menu
showing the tab titles becomes pretty useless after a certain number has been
reached.

I'm amazed in 2018 it seems tab management (> 20 tabs) is still so awful.

------
Endy
With each new Firefox release, it gets farther and farther away from what the
browser once was. I started using Firefox over a decade ago, now it's become
just a different version of awful. I don't know exactly happened when Mozilla
lost their perspective, but I do know when - the first introduction of
Australis. And they should have figured out, when you name it after something
upside-down, you should seriously wonder if it's upside down. WebExtensions is
just piling error upon error.

And with each new release, more control is taken from the user, more decent
features are removed. I swear, Firefox peaked at 4.0.

~~~
mook
I think it really went downhill earlier than that; somewhere around 4 was when
they stopped trying to work with the ecosystem and just started blocking
things instead. Perhaps I've accidentally got rose-tinted glasses on though…

------
fiatjaf
My take on how Firefox is better than Chrome:
[https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-
chrome.txt](https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-chrome.txt)

(No politics, just the raw browser features. Also, I'm a long time Chrome
user, switched to Firefox an year ago, then back to Chrome for a week and now
permanently on Firefox.)

------
deforciant
I really like Firefox but unfortunately it doesn't run well on my machine. I
have Ryzen 2700X, geforce 1080 Ti, running current Ubuntu but firefox is using
1 full CPU at 100% (load is moving from one core to another) and constantly
lags. Researched a lot for any similar problems but couldn't find any
solution.

Has anyone seen anything like this and maybe even solved it?

~~~
craftyguy
Have you considered submitting a bug report? That's likely to get more
attention than complaining on some random internet forum.

------
QasimK
I really love Firefox, and I’m still holding out for HiDPI support on Wayland.
Currently it is a little awful to use...

------
sslalready
Is it just me or does the HSTS preload list not work in Firefox 62 (macOS
10.12)? I see a plaintext HTTP request when opening
[http://www.google.com](http://www.google.com) instead of an immediate https
connection to www.google.com.

------
JimminyCrocket
Youtube on Firefox for me is awful. I get constant buffering on 1080p+
content. Chrome is flawless. I have the same extensions on both browsers,
curious if anyone else has experienced the same recently?

~~~
aidenn0
There was an article on HN about this recently. I'm on phone so can't search
easily, but something about it using a polyfill for a chrome specific feature.
There was a way to get the old behavior in the article I think.

~~~
cpeterso
You install the "YouTube Classic" Firefox extension to force YouTube to use
its old (non-Polymer) layout. This extension won't help with video buffering
issues, however.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-
class...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-classic/)

------
andy_ppp
Is Pocket the only bookmarking service available? Seems a bit off that there
is no public interface to this and the Mozilla seem to have some kind of
agreement with Pocket?

~~~
james_pm
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-
po...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/)

------
exodust
If the status bar is still missing, I'm not interested in Firefox 62. They
should never have taken that option away in their pathetic "make it look like
Chrome" weakness of product strategy.

------
darn
There is no non hacky way to make chrome not close window when you close the
last tab. That's enough for me to drop it as my main browser. That's like
literally the only thing I look for in a browser

------
caiob
> Added Canadian English (en-CA) locale

Not bad, Eh?!

~~~
ianbicking
Some thorough translator finished translating all the strings for a project of
mine into en-CA, which triggered the build error for having two exactly
identical files in the tree (since en-CA was entirely identical to en-US).
Nothing is free! This is why we can't have useless things!

~~~
escherplex
Yes but don't you think it's skookum (BC) and aboot time for Newfie-speak to
be recognized, eh? But after awhile multiple locale files do appear more like
vanity metrics in apps like LibreOffice, with 18 possible English locale
settings. Even the OED simply incorporates regional variations in its
inventory so the need for redundancy does seem questionable. And in spell
checking or grammar, illustration of possible regional variations may be
useful to authors. EG, a Brit writes to a Yank 'I am going to shop', with
'shop' treated as a noun. But to the Yank 'to shop' would be an infinitive so
a grammar check could point out that ambiguity.

------
guilhas
Firefox 55 working great, most extensions supported and containers working

~~~
konart
Note that they will be removing legacy extensions from their store soon:
[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-
re...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-
legacy-firefox-add-ons-from-add-on-portal-in-early-october/)

~~~
plopz
The sad thing is that there still isn't good replacements for the old addons
and mozilla hasn't shown much progress in adding the needed apis to
webextensions.

------
phkahler
>> Improved graphics rendering for Windows users without accelerated hardware
using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting

Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics
hardware?!?!?! And yet Wayland support is still not up to snuff.

I use Firefox almost exclusively, but Mozilla seems to have some strange
priorities. It's not just them, it's a lot of people out there doing what they
want instead of what's good for their users.

~~~
muizelaar
From
[https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/](https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/):

Linux users are about 2.7% of Firefox users

Windows users are 93.2% of Firefox users

27.7% of Windows users don't have Direct2D

That means 25.8% of users "run windows on hardware without decent graphics
hardware". So it's entirely reasonable to prioritize these 25.8% of users over
the 2.7% on Linux.

~~~
craftyguy
How many Linux users disable telemetry collection vs windows users (who are
most certainly used to spewing telemetry to external parties)? I definitely
disable it on all of my (Linux) systems where I run Firefox. I suspect I am
not alone.

~~~
TheDong
If you disable telemetry and then complain firefox is not prioritizing
developing firefox for your system, don't be surprised if your complaints fall
on deaf ears.

~~~
craftyguy
Please point out where I was complaining about firefox not prioritizing
development for Linux. Thanks.

~~~
TheDong
This comment chain is about Mozilla prioritizing a windows thing over linux /
wayland work.

You're commenting in defense of the original comment, so while you didn't
explicitly complain about it, you implicitly supported the complaint.

~~~
craftyguy
No, I was merely pointing that their data is incomplete. I couldn't care any
less about mozilla's priorities, since firefox is not my main browser on the
desktop.

