
Firefox 69.0 Released - sulkie
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/69.0/releasenotes/
======
Aardwolf
> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any
> video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically
> play with sound.

Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to
prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway
to actually hear it!

Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so
much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?

And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small
percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser?

P.S. I already had autoplay for videos without sound disabled through
about:config flags, but some videos managed to autoplay anyway. I wonder if
they also fixed that issue, or simply made the about:config flag part of the
settings dialog.

~~~
tasty_freeze
Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB
hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it
streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
> 5KB news article

On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that
I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS,
images, etc. with or without video.

~~~
bradgessler
I created [https://legiblenews.com/](https://legiblenews.com/) because of this
frustration ... and took it all the way to the level where loading a page is
exactly 1 request.

The other frustration I’ve had with news websites is they don’t link to source
material, so it’s impossible to dig into a topic and accidentally learn
something.

~~~
thirdsun
I like it. However given your goal of delivering sane and lighweight news
articles you might want to extend that mission to the selection of your
sources and consider excluding some. For the Boris Johnson story you link to
The Independent, which returns a 14 MB article (while autplaying is disabled
in Firefox) and basically has become a collection of worst practices when it
comes to user experience and web development. Surely there must be better
sources for popular stories like these.

~~~
gregknicholson
The data comes from [Wikipedia's Current Events portal][1], so the site's
author isn't directly choosing those sources.

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events)

------
Aardwolf
> For our users in the US or using the en-US browser, we are shipping a new
> “New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of Pocket’s content.

With all due respect, if you have to call it an "experience" you know it's
something nobody asked for :p

~~~
marrone12
I like the Pocket recommendations ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
suby
I'd be fine if they limited it to just unpaid recommendations, but they
include sponsored pocket stories in the new page tab too. It's inserting
advertising into the web browser in a round-about way.

~~~
_coveredInBees
Good thing you can turn it off?

If you're not paying Mozilla for their browser, it seems weird to me to bitch
and complain about ways Mozilla explores to generate some revenue without
selling out their user's privacy. Especially when they make it very easy to
opt out of the thing you don't like. Comments like yours are what makes me
very nervous about the future for Mozilla. They are still entirely at the
mercy of Google and their revenue sharing agreement for enabling Google as the
default search engine. The day that ends, they are going to be in deep trouble
if their user base is so hostile to any potential avenues they choose to
explore to stay afloat.

~~~
ferzul
where's the button that gives me the paid version, and is it just a donation
or a version that gives me a better, ahem, experience?

~~~
maccard
You can make a donation, and turn off the feature. That means everyone who
can't/doesn't want to make a donation can still have the same experience as
you, and you can still support FF.

------
geewee
It didn't make it to the developer notes, but Firefox 69 should be the first
one to ship with unhandledrejection event on by default[0] - I'm so looking
forward to being able to catch promises and do proper error handling on them
in Firefox without having to jump through hoops

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Window/unha...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Window/unhandledrejection_event#Browser_compatibility)

~~~
ataylor32
> It didn't make it to the developer notes

I see it here:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/69#JavaScript)

~~~
geewee
Oh yes, you're right. It obviously just didn't make into the release
announcement

------
kuu
_For our users in the US or using the en-US browser, we are shipping a new
“New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of Pocket’s content._

Uhmmm...

~~~
gnud
It _really_ bugs me that pocket isn't packaged as a pre-installed extension,
that you can uninstall normally.

~~~
sellingwebsite
But you can disable it quite easily:

about:config -> extensions.pocket.enabled: false

~~~
nyolfen
i would find it very surprising if more than 2 or 3% of firefox users have
ever used about:config at all

------
gourlaysama
> With the deprecation of Adobe Flash Player, there is no longer a need to
> identify users on 32-bit version of the Firefox browser on 64-bit version
> operating systems[, ]reducing user agent fingerprinting factors.

Good. User agents already contain too much.

That's actually the first time I've ever seen a browser actively _removing_
stuff from the User Agent.

~~~
kn0where
I believe Safari stopped increasing the browser version in the user agent some
time ago.

~~~
thekyle
So what does it do now? Is it just an older version number or did they remove
the number altogether.

------
plopz
> Firefox no longer loads userChrome.css or userContent.css by default
> improving start-up performance. Users who wish to customize Firefox by using
> these files can set the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
> preference to true to restore this ability.

How much of a performance improvement does this make?

~~~
dictum
I use userChrome.css and userContent.css, and I get the nagging feeling that
the silent end of that sentence is "...when we eventually replace the code
that currently enables user customization with faster, less flexible APIs."

(I'm paranoid and FUDing because I care: there's some UX low hanging fruit
before they could get rid of userChrome.css. For instance, you need
userChrome.css to autohide the toolbar in full screen mode on macOS — that's
not even a customization, it's a missing feature.)

~~~
StavrosK
I mean, how slow could an "if file_exists()" check have been? This smells like
deprecation to me, if the user CSS doesn't exist, don't load anything. Boom,
no slowdown.

~~~
bzbarsky
The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on
an SSD". That's not great, actually, if you're trying to shave tens of
milliseconds at a time off startup performance.

For what it's worth, this change happened because people were seeing the
stat() call involved in startup profiles, taking sufficient time that it
seemed worthwhile to avoid it if possible, as far as I can tell.

~~~
StavrosK
Are many users on HDDs these days? Weird that it would take this long,
although I guess it's niche enough that you'd want to save those 20 ms for
something used by a tiny fraction of users.

~~~
dblohm7
> Are many users on HDDs these days?

Yes, there are. They are not a niche cohort.

EDIT: In fact, we have many more users with magnetic HDDs than who use
userChrome.css. That tells you everything you need to know about this decision
right there.

------
denzil_correa
> macOS users on dual-graphics-card machines (like MacBook Pro) will switch
> back to the low-power GPU more aggressively, saving battery life.

macOS user base can now consider FF as a viable browser alternative.

~~~
lorenzhs
There are more macOS battery life improvements coming in Firefox 70 in around
six weeks:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255)

~~~
sciurus
For some measurements:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c45](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c45)

------
cmrdporcupine
Can someone clarify for me what "Enhanced Tracking Protection" covers? The
text on Mozilla's pages is a bit fluff, I'm interested in the mechanics of it.

I've been out of ad-tech for about 5 years, but when I was working in that
industry it was common to drop evil cookie pixels everywhere in the page and
then do cookie-matching with them ("my cookie for this user is X, do we per-
chance have a match with something you have?")

Will this effectively end that by preventing cookies from domains that aren't
the domain of the site itself?

I hope so.

~~~
SamuelAdams
From here [1]:

For new users who install and download Firefox for the first time, Enhanced
Tracking Protection will automatically be set on by default as part of the
‘Standard’ setting in the browser and will block known “third-party tracking
cookies” according to the Disconnect list. We talk more about tracking cookies
here. Enhanced Tracking Protection will be practically invisible to you and
you’ll only notice that it’s operating when you visit a site and see a shield
icon in the address bar next to the URL address and the small “i” icon. When
you see the shield icon, you should feel safe that Firefox is blocking
thousands of companies from your online activity.

A better source is probably the disconnect site [2]:

> Tracking is the collection of data regarding a particular user's activity
> across multiple websites or applications that aren’t owned by the data
> collector, and the retention, use or sharing of that data.

> Our definition focuses on collection AND retention. So, for example, the
> definition wouldn’t apply to sites that log an IP address, but don’t save
> that information in a database. The definition also focuses on particular
> users, so data that is immediately aggregated doesn’t apply. And the
> collection is across context, so it doesn’t apply in cases when there is
> solely a first-party relationship with the user, for example the site only
> collects and retains information on site visitors.

[1]: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-
availab...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available-
with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/)

[2]:
[https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection](https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection)

~~~
cmrdporcupine
This isn't really explaining the "how" to me though.

The way I remember it is, as the page host I have a cookie on you. Then I drop
in a 1-pixel image to a third party, and in the query string to it I write in
a hashed form of the cookie I have for you. That HTTP request then itself can
go through the cookie process, but for the third party. They then check their
DB for both their own issued cookie and the value you passed in, and are then
able to perform some asynchronous (batch or otherwise) match to associate the
two IDs. From then on, an ad etc. can be targeted based on that info.

~~~
greenyoda
Yeah, it doesn't seem that merely blocking third party cookies can address a
scenario like this, where the main site colludes with the third party tracking
site.

To avoid this, it still seems like the best approach is to use an ad blocker
add-on like uBlock Origin, which will block any content from known tracking
domains from being loaded. That should get rid of the third party image.

There's also uMatrix (from the maker of uBlock Origin), which can selectively
block images, scripts, etc. from third party sites.

------
RussianCow
I've been using the Firefox 69 beta since it came out, and with auto-playing
audio and video set to blocked, some sites still somehow manage to auto-start
muted videos. Is this a bug I should report, or is there some exception that
websites are taking advantage of (like starting the video via an event handler
like onscroll)?

~~~
grezql
maybe it should be blocked by default, then one can "whitelist" domain.

My fingers are itching to ban some sites... such as cnn.com, dailymailco.uk

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
dailymail.co.uk is already banned in my house for other reasons.

~~~
dev_dull
Why?

------
envornment
> _The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block
> any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that
> automatically play with sound._

Does this also block GIFs from auto-playing? Blocking no-sound videos from
auto-playing will keep GIFs alive for another decade.

~~~
thiagomgd
not having a real alternative to GIFs will keep them alive for another decade.
By real alternative I mean: behaves like an image, you drag'n'drop like an
image, on your desktop shows the thumbnail of an image and when you open,
doesn't open the video player, play just once and stops.

------
manquer
Enhanced Tracking Protection feature is enabled by default in this release.

------
bobcostas55
The font rendering on the mozilla website is absolutely horrific (Firefox
68/Windows 7):
[https://i.imgur.com/JMpq9Xe.png](https://i.imgur.com/JMpq9Xe.png)

~~~
Astrobastard
These settings (in about:config) makes font rendering look near identical to
Chrome for me:

    
    
      gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.enhanced_contrast = 0
      gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode = 5
      gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families = ""

~~~
bobcostas55
There has to be some reason why those are not the defaults though, right?

~~~
dblohm7
My understanding is that Chrome is the outlier when it comes to font
rendering.

~~~
thiagomgd
but still is what most people are used to... so in a sense, chrome is the
default

------
timeimp
>Finder on macOS now displays download progress for files being downloaded

It's the little things that are making me go back to Firefox more-and-more

------
kup0
Hope this release somehow magically fixes an ongoing issue in Windows 10 I've
had with Firefox.

The gist of it is that Firefox, and only Firefox, will cause my Windows 10
system to completely hard freeze (no mouse movement, no response period) for
about 30-60 seconds at a time, multiple times daily. It's so frustrating that
it makes FF unusable for me.

It's odd because it seems to be a rare issue that has to do with it not
letting go of a GPU handle/process/thread or something, from what I've been
able to deduce from others having this issue that have posted bugs in the
tracker. I've tried everything under the sun to fix it, but _no other program,
period_ has this problem. I game, I use other browsers, I do all sorts of
stuff on this PC with zero issues, but Firefox gives me these temporary hard-
freezes. Ugh.

~~~
canada_dry
> only Firefox will cause my Windows 10 system to completely hard freeze

Whenever I experience this type of thing I can't help but speculate that
issues like this are not serendipity at work.

I recollect reading an article years back from a Microsoft developer who spoke
about how it was quite common for Windows code to take specific actions based
on which app was running - ostensibly to 'improve the user experience'.
Though, it's not hard to imagine MS using this for the opposite purpose. And,
since their code is proprietary, who would know?

~~~
kup0
Seems somewhat unlikely in this instance, because apparently the issue I'm
running into is pretty rare. There are millions of people using FF on W10
daily without any issues. Heck, _even I_ have other W10 machines where it
doesn't happen.

------
purple_ducks
> For our users on Windows 10, you’ll see performance and UI improvements:

> For our existing Windows 10 users, you can easily find and launch Firefox
> from a shortcut on the Win10 taskbar.

???

As opposed to before?!

~~~
Someone1234
I suspect that is their way of telling us that the installer now adds a
taskbar shortcut.

------
m712
The good: ETP by default, battery life improvements, flash deprecation
(finally!), about:debugging, event breakppints (finally! #2)

The bad: userChrome/userContent not being loaded by default, I don't
understand why it would cause a delay at startup.

The ugly: More Pocket crap.

------
shmerl
Note, this version disables userChrome.css in new profiles. If you need it,
enable it in about:config:

    
    
        toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true
    

I spent some time wondering why it's not working. The key name is totally not
obvious, especially since it doesn't have anything resembling userChrome in
it.

------
keithnz
Just out of interest, how many people run the "release" version of Firefox?

I'm currently using Firefox Developer on the latest auroua update channel
version ( 70.0b3 ).

I haven't really expereienced any problems and am only vaugely aware of new
things from time to time. Actually mostly I'm not sure if I'm noticing
something new or something that's existed for a long time. Like for instance
the other day I put in an address in the address bar and it gave me a "switch
to tab" option because I already had that open in a browser window, I swear
that's new, but I'm not sure!

~~~
nitemice
I have been using Firefox Developer for about 6 months, but after two
incidents of week-long bugs that caused my browser to crash after a variable
number of minutes, no matter what I had open, I've decided to swap back to the
release version.

Yeah, you get a few cool features a bit early, but I just can't stand the
instability anymore. Pluis, I'm not actually using any of the "Developer"
features, so there's really no reason for me to not just run release.

------
XJ6
> The network panel will now show blocked resources

Good! I remember losing quite some time before I realised something wasn't in
the network tab because it never fired rather than failing to be triggered by
the application code.

------
isarat
The privacy aspect of Firefox is great. The containers also a great thing and
help us to a great extend. Beyond the privacy aspects, I really wish if
Firefox pays attention to little things that can make the life of a user a bit
better.

\- The Firefox sign in process is considerably improved, with a link based
sign in with email. The fact is that you will not be singed in to email on the
first time usage. So you are behind a wall to start browsing and the cognitive
load not to leave the tab before completing setup. This experience with Google
Chrome is far far better, as it’s one time setup using your Google Account .
Even if you discount the google’s ownership and single account sign in, there
are considerable improvements to be made in the onboarding process

\- The Pocket integration is substandard to the Pocket extension.

\- The Top sites and highlights are too big for my aesthetics. It could be
little cuter in the way it appears.

\- Moving a video to full screen makes your blank for a second and not a
smooth transition as in Chrome or Safari

\- Lack of certain platform specific integrations such as Look Up on macOS to
get the dictionary triggered by selected word. It works across all the other
browsers well. On Firefox, I need to make a google search.

\- The tab bar is ugly and has lot of blank spaces

\- No default support for dark mode which works beautifully well on Chrome and
Safari in a very early stage. More than a feature, the slowness in picking up
platform specific features.

\- The containers concept is really great but not for most of the general
users to make use of it. It’s still a bit geeky in nature.

\- I’ve to go with standard privacy settings to make my sites work including
google. Making the privacy settings strong doesn’t help much and get signed
out of the sessions very frequently. \- I use an app called Magnet on Mac to
snap my windows easily by dragging to corners. The snapping works great on all
browsers by dragging a tab to one of the corners. But Firefox just releases
the tab once it’s pulled out from the current window. We need to drag again
this to the corners. More than a third-party workflow, it’s about how these
windows are defined and behaves in a standard way

~~~
steve19
> \- The containers concept is really great but not for most of the general
> users to make use of it. It’s still a bit geeky in nature.

This. Containers are quite complicated to reason about, require a fair amount
of setup and do not sync. Not to mention the color pallete is bizarrely
limited.

I use both Firefox and Chrome but use Chrome for work because Profiles are
much easier to use. I just open another profile, which loads with a nice theme
and a set of extensions (limiting my exposure to some extensions in other
profiles).

Profiles are so simple and just work.

Firefox of course has profiles, but you cannot run two of them at the same
time without using the command line (or creating shortcuts to launch multiple
versions of the browser).

------
povertyworld
I have a bunch of Facebook domains in my hosts, but for some reason Firefox
69.0 gets DNS from somewhere else and goes right through. Weird. The other
stuff in hosts resolves correctly.

~~~
k1t
It could be DNS over https, which Mozilla have been experimenting with.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-
https](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https)

~~~
povertyworld
It wasn't on by default, but yeah, once I turned it on, it entirely bypassed
hosts for everything, not just Facebook owned domains.

------
mkr-hn
A nice feature that should be standard:

>> _" The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block
any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically
play with sound."_

One time I hit a site with a huge anti-ad block message at the top that said I
couldn't watch the video until I disabled my adblocker. But...I came for an
article. The article wasn't obstructed. I assume the video was auto-playing. I
decided to go back and try another result.

------
TheRealPomax
Honestly the big one for me is being able to finally debug async code, which
Chrome has been able to do for a long time, and FF simply couldn't. As someone
who uses FF as main browser, not being able to use to for modern code and
being forced into using a different browser for proper debugging has been
quite frustrating.

------
iicc
Thank you Mozillians!

------
alexryndin
seems it works much faster on sway + wayland + 4k display, but still slower
than with XWayland

------
techntoke
Still no mention of hardware-accelerated video on Linux. Can't consider
Firefox until this is implemented, but it works on Chromium in multiple
distros. Seems like Chromium folks are more apt to actually prioritize Linux
over Mozilla.

~~~
opencl
Eh it works in Chromium with patches that Google won't upstream because there
are a lot of configs it doesn't work on.

The biggest blocker for it in Firefox seems to be webrender landing in stable.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726)

------
MarcysVonEylau
Nice.

------
Siecje
How do you block cryptominers?

~~~
aorth
Install uBlock Origin and activate its "resource abuse" lists?

------
emeraldx
Nice

------
oarabbus_
nice

------
floatboth
nice

------
daveheq
No way dude

------
classics2
Is rss still too hard for Firefox?

------
beardedman
ANY news on the fact that FF makes my Mac sound like it's gonna take off?? I
honestly can't understand how an issue so prevalent gets ignored for so long
by them.

For those doubting, do a simple Google with "firefox cpu".

~~~
joduplessis
Not happening with mine.

------
ohduran
Wait, Firefox Monitor? As in "allow us to store your email and password in
case your email and password are pwned in some other site"? Does anyone else
think this is prone to disaster, eventually?

~~~
shakna
It utilises K-anonymity, making it difficult if not impossible for this to
become a massive data leak.

The email gets hashed on your device, and the start of that hash is sent off
to the server. The server returns a list of all the hashes that might match.
The client then checks that list for complete matches.

~~~
megous
Sounds fairly reasonable. I was already getting afraid of my private email
addresses being leaked via this check.

