
Firefox 72.0 - Shinkirou
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/72.0/releasenotes/
======
fauigerzigerk
Here's my Firefox wishlist:

\- Open new windows more quickly. Firefox feels sluggish (on Mac) even though
it isn't, simply because it opens new windows far more slowly than Safari or
Chrome.

\- Use the platform native key store. I don't want my passwords stored
unencrypted on disk. But I don't want to enter a separate master password
either. I do want to use fingerprint/face unlock on mobile to reveal
passwords.

\- Give me a setting to autoconfirm all cookie consent requests and lobby for
a legally binding do-not-track header. Cookie consent was well meaning, but it
has turned out to make things worse. Let's move on.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
> lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header.

DNT is pretty dead, and IMHO was never a good idea in the first place. Opt-
outing of invasive and unethical tracking is just weird. What about people who
don't know about it? Or don't fully understand what it means?

It's almost like the _Hitchhiker 's Guide_: "Well, you should have visited the
planning department in the disused lavatory with a sign 'beware of the
leopard".

I wrote some more about it over here:
[https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html](https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html)

~~~
stuartd
The ultimate irony of DNT was that trackers could use the header as browser
fingerprinting data..

~~~
floatboth
Well, it only adds one bit of information, that is probably highly correlated
with everything else being unique as well :)

------
coldfire
As a long time Chrome user, and someone who (admittedly) said to a FF fan
about an year ago, that it's too late for FF to catch up to Chrome now. I gave
FF another shot about 6 months ago, and I'm liking it more every month since
then.

It has been my primary browser outside of work, the major reason I use Chrome
now is for Chrome Dev Tools.

Also, some websites don't behave well in FF and I find that most of the time
it's because of the site tracking being blocked. So not a big deal

~~~
slovenlyrobot
Posts like this always come up in these threads and they're really great, but
it's worth adding that 'switching to Firefox' isn't something anyone actually
has to do. Just start using it for one thing or another and any complete
change will happen naturally if it makes any sense. It's a process that
involves no effort and no risk

The only thing I use Chrome for is gaming, graphics perf is still miles better
than Firefox. But I'd never trust Chrome with anything as much as a private
URL or a username or password, for much the same reason I wouldn't stick my
hand through the bars of a cage while visiting the zoo. Did they ever get
around to fixing that opt-out password sync crap?

~~~
Caspy7
> 'switching to Firefox' isn't something anyone actually has to do. Just start
> using it for one thing or another and any complete change will happen
> naturally

This is going to vary with different people. Have you heard the phrase
"Default is destiny"? This is especially true for less technical people (the
majority of web users).

Personally I'm not going to dabble, rather keeping to the safe and familiar,
so I have to intentionally trial run something as my goto/default.

~~~
saagarjha
Chrome isn't the default on a lot of platforms.

~~~
sharmi
It is on chrome notebooks. And every search on google.com prompts you to
install chrome for 'a better user experience'. Soon, just by plain nagging, it
ends up becoming default

------
Twirrim
"Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more delightful
experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer interrupt your
browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the address bar when
you interact with the site."

That should pretty much kill off a lot of the notification request crap,
especially if Chrome follows suit. I can envision the conversion rate
massively falling off when it's no longer something right in your face.

~~~
hedora
Slack has started disabling unrelated features if you disallow notifications.
For instance, you can’t add channels to the “ignore @here” list if
notifications are off. I’m sure this’ll get worse over time.

FF needs a “disable notifications, but lie to the website and say they’re
enabled” button.

~~~
marcosdumay
I don't understand why browsers would ever not lie about this.

~~~
rtpg
"Why are my notifications for Slack not working?"

~~~
OskarS
"Because you've declined to get notifications for Slack"

This does not seem like a reasonable complaint to me.

~~~
ViViDboarder
But the application would have no way of knowing that to display this message
to the user if the browser lies about it.

~~~
ric2b
"Check if you have notifications enabled for Slack on your browser's settings"

------
giancarlostoro
> Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more
> delightful experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer
> interrupt your browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the
> address bar when you interact with the site.

This is fantastic! I had finally figured out I could turn this off in settings
a while ago, glad it's now a default. I get so annoyed by this, annoying
indeed!

~~~
megous
Well, it's delightfully stupid.

In a webapp where you present user a button to activate notifiactions, when
the user clicks the button seemingly nothing happens in FF72 (user is focussed
on a big enable notifiactions button in the web app and may not notice that
some tiny gray icon wiggled a little in the address bar).

On a big screen a button in the middle of the screen is so far away from the
address bar, that you don't see any change in the address bar at all in the
peripheral vision.

So yeah, web apps that don't try to force the user to enable notifications are
now punished for good behavior again.

EDIT: So it's not so stupid, see below.

~~~
krtkush
How about web apps too not show annoying pop-ups which are pretty useless in
most cases? Websites which show two pop-ups (custom pop-up followed by browser
pop-up) are worse.

~~~
megous
My website doesn't show any popups. I have a settings dialog that user can
open and setup email and other notifications.

This will just not work anymore. I'll have to add some long winded FF specific
explanation on what to do after clicking the button.

Anyway the FF UI is broken if user physically can't see any reaction from the
browser after he requests notifications by clicking anywhere on the page.

~~~
johannh
If your users are clicking a button then it should actually show the
permission prompt, unless you're losing the user interaction somewhere in the
callback (by doing something async first)

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/upcoming-notification-
perm...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/upcoming-notification-permission-
changes-in-firefox-72/)

This is a frequent "mistake"/issue however, and we're working on a mitigation
for it.

~~~
megous
I'm doing this:

[https://megous.com/dl/tmp/sub.txt](https://megous.com/dl/tmp/sub.txt)

I guess this is then happening because I'm first checking if there's a
subscription via `pushManager.getSubscription` before creating a new one in
the event handler.

Yep, dropping getSubscription makes the popup appear again.

------
gombosg
I've been using Firefox for the last 10 or so years. (Used the "new Chrome-
Opera" for a while but went back soon)

These recent developments are awesome. As a frontend developer, I also find
the devtools absolutely competitive with Chrome's.

The default ad- and tracker blocking is nice, I only need to use uBblock
Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that), since Youtube became nearly
unusable due to the massive amount of ads.

Edit: also, they are fortunately tackling two prominent annoyances of the
"modern web" i.e. push notification popups (for those who don't turn the whole
feature off outright in about:config) and video autoplay.

So sad that Firefox's market share is still just 9-10%. :(

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
> I only need to use uBblock Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that),
> since Youtube became nearly unusable due to the massive amount of ads.

Depends how much you're using it, but as it's pretty much become the primary
source of entertainment in our household I decided the most practical and
ethical option was to just pay for it.

~~~
wooger
Not sure this is even an option outside the US.

~~~
mtmrmuthu
It is available in a lot of countries.

[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en)

------
butz
With notification spam fixed, how about tackling cookie banners spam next?
Let's work on a standard to allow user to set their preferred cookie settings
level once in browser UI and keep websites clean.

~~~
alerighi
Unfortunately, they are required by law (at least in Europe) and we can't do
much about it. You can't say use a browser API to set a global setting for
them, because GDPR explicitly requires that every website must get the user
consent for them.

Of course the real solution (and the reason why GDPR introduced the banner) is
for website to stop using cookies for tracking their users and thus have no
reason to put the banner (you don't need the banner for technical cookies,
such as the one used for logins, but only for third party profiling cookies).

~~~
antisthenes
> You can't say use a browser API to set a global setting for them, because
> GDPR explicitly requires that every website must get the user consent for
> them.

I can see why that prevents a browser from auto-accepting all cookies, but how
in the world does this logic apply to me if I want to deny consent to 100% of
the websites to use cookies?

Set the default on the browser to deny all consent, and show the cookie
notification somewhere unobtrusive, the same way it was done for
notifications.

~~~
efreak
The browser already has logic/settings controlling which cookies are accepted
(first party, all, none). These settings have existed in most browsers for
years. It's unfortunate that the cookie law didn't build on this in some way.

~~~
kuschku
The cookie law is very flexible. It considers any and all ways in which the
user makes their intent explicit as good enough.

The issue is that websites want to annoy users until they finally maybe
actually say yes to get the site to shut up.

Legally, tracking has to be off by default, tracking may not change the
usability of the site, and tracking has to be purely optional, and the "no"
has to be simpler, larger, and easier to use than the "yes".

The point of the GDPR, over the course of the next years, is to utterly
destroy online advertising as a business model, and any and all tracking
solutions with it.

------
zamadatix
If this seems faster than normal it is. 72 is the first major version released
on the new 4 week release cycle.

------
miohtama
Note that with some tinkering you can already manually enable WebRender, fast
GPU and Rust based rendering engine, in stable Firefox

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206)

~~~
aganame
Note also that enabling webrender might make your experience (including
performance) worse.

~~~
nojvek
Why would that be ?

~~~
Caspy7
Because it's already enabled on hardware where it's known to work well but
disabled where it has issues.

~~~
miohtama
Yeah, it is definitely not bug free and tabs crash more often. However I still
feel performance improvement and happy to live on the edge.

MacBook Pro 2017.

------
jdlyga
I keep trying Chrome out every so often, but there's little usability issues
that keep bringing me back to Firefox. For example, Chrome never wants to
bring me to the correct sites when you start typing letters. It's always a
site I maybe visited once (like nypost instead of news.ycombinator.com)

~~~
dannyw
That's because one of Chrome team's KPIs is how many Google searches are
performed through the Omnibar, and better tab search would decrease that KPI
and decrease Google ad revenue.

Think about it: it's a web browser literally built by the biggest search
company in the world. The latest version of Chrome will even add Google Drive
files to the omnibar search for G Suite users.

There is no excuse that they have a worse omnnibox search than Firefox.

------
zamadatix
I know the hacks blog tends to stick to "what web technologies changed" but 72
also introduces "Experimental support for using client certificates from the
OS certificate store can be enabled by setting the preference
security.osclientcerts.autoload to true (Windows only)." which has always been
a huge PITA for me while testing and many interested in these technology
changes are probably interested in this flag (though maybe moreso when
Mac/Linux get supported).

~~~
worble
I've always used the security.enterprise_roots.enabled flag for this, is this
new one different?

~~~
Boulth
From the property name it sounds like your property is about trust roots (CAs)
and parent's about client certificates (for mutual TLS authentication).

------
_ph_
I love the Picture in Picture feature. There are too many web sites which
leave you only the choice between a rather small video or full screen. With
PIP I can choose the size which works best for my screen. Also, as it floats
on top, it is never covered by other applications.

One thing would make this even more increadible: is there a way to set the
default size and position? If the PIP feature would always start in my
preferred size and position, this would be just so great.

~~~
lysp
I use it all the time.

I generally have my browser take up 3/4 of the screen with a small bit of
space on the right free.

If watching a video I can drag it into this free space and continue using
browser while it's playing.

Many years ago I used to use "popup video" extensions to achieve the same
thing. This works much better though.

~~~
_ph_
With my preferred setup, I play videos in the upper left corner, so with the
current Firefox behavior, I always have to drag the PiP video around. Not the
end of the world, but it would be a huge improvement, if it remembered video
positions.

------
AdrianoKF
Can't wait to find out if this release fixes a bug
([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160))
that was preventing correct rendering of extension popup windows/context menus
when the APZ zooming was enabled (which allows pinch-to-zoom gestures, e.g. on
the MS Surface).

Update: Just got to try it out, seems like it indeed works now. Yay Firefox
72!

~~~
vardump
Finally! Been waiting for functional pinch zooming on macOS and Windows for
ages. Thank you Mozilla team!

------
L_Rahman
I'm honestly surprised that we aren't talking about tab behavior here.
Literally the only reason I keep using Chrome is that no matter how many tabs
I have open, they're all visible at the top.

There's visual persistence of state. On Firefox, even with the trick of
reducing minimum tab width, my tabs overflow and I have to click through to
get different groups of tabs. It is utterly maddening and I don't know why
every other browser refuses to do Chrome like tabs.

Why the continued choice to violate the first rule of UI design which is to
keep things in the same place?

~~~
zipperhead
If you want to talk about tab behaviour, you might want to have a look at the
Tree Style Tabs extension:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

Tabs are placed in the sidebar, nested in collapsible trees, with a scrollbar.
It's a major game changer.

~~~
kylek
I'm always surprised when I find out more people don't know about this (or
other vertical-tabs addons). I typically have dozens of tabs and keep them
open for weeks at a time (ff is set to restore previous session. So most are
usually unloaded, but I also have an addon to unload tabs at-will if it's ever
a problem). Horizontal tabs feel so arcane after getting used to it, I'm
surprised it's not a standard feature yet.

------
throw7
Are they doing anything about floating videos? It's annoying on desktop, but
on mobile it's so bad I just don't bother. Typically it's "news" sites that
use it.

~~~
bn7t
IIRC they disabled autoplay for videos with sound. In the settings you can
also completely disable autoplay for all videos.

------
typon
The picture in picture is such a great feature. Thanks Firefox devs :)

~~~
fishbacon
Picture in picture was a feature I didn't know I wanted all along.

I often had a window open only playing a youtube video, having it be native to
the browser and always on top is such a great feature.

~~~
whoopdedo
Open in new window. Resize window. Right-click title bar, select "Always on
Top".

App developers spend a lot of their time making up for the poor decisions of
OS developers. A good window manager would give you tabs for free, PiP (aka an
always-on-top window) for free, dark mode for free. Instead OS devs go
overboard in simplifying things to the point that app devs have to pay the
cost of delivering what users want.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Win10 (the version I have at work) has removed "keep above" and made it
application specific, OneNote has it, Word doesn't. It's crazy.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Windows has never had a universal "keep above" menu option.

------
markosaric
It's such a great update again!

And now this: "Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans
to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month"

I love how Google follows Firefox with these "better web experience" features
but only if they don't impact their business model.

------
mtm7
Firefox keeps getting better. I really want to switch. The only thing that’s
holding me back is the design. It just doesn’t look as modern as Chrome or
Brave. The back button is a different height than the search bar; the tab
container doesn’t line up with the search from the left side of the window.
And it has a weird mix of slightly-square and rounded buttons, which makes it
feel like a second-class browser.

I know that the average person isn’t concerned with these things, but I spend
almost all of my day in a browser, and I want it to look as good (or better)
than the competition.

~~~
andrewkdinh
If you’re interested in having Chrome’s look in Firefox, check out
MaterialFox.

[https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox](https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox)

~~~
mtm7
Wow, I didn't even realize this was possible. It looks really nice. Thanks!

~~~
plopz
Unfortunately userchrome.css breaks frequently with firefox updates and is a
pain to maintain since it is outside of the extension ecosystem.

There used to be a great addon called ClassicThemeRestorer that got killed
during firefox's terrible web extension debacle. It lives on in
[https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx](https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx)
but different parts break everytime the fickle designers at mozilla change
their mind on what a tab should look like.

------
Rotten194
I find the notification permission change (requiring it to be after a user
gesture) really annoying. It doesn't do almost anything to combat permission
spam (if you're visiting a clickbait site, you'll probably click or scroll at
least once, especially on mobile where sites usually have a giant header so
you need to scroll past the fold to even see that the article is clickbait),
and just inconveniences developers who have to special-case Firefox's
divergence from the spec when trying to _legitimately_ use the gated features.

~~~
pier25
Firefox should include a setting to disable all requests for notifications
much like they give you total control to block autoplay.

~~~
barryvan
It does! [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no-
notifications/](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no-notifications/)

~~~
pier25
Finally!

------
drummer
If anyone from Mozilla is reading, is it too much to ask to host apk's for the
mobile version on your site and provide other update mechanisms apart from
google app store? Like what Signal are doing.

~~~
sp332
It's not the most discoverable thing, but according to
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android)
this link will always download the newest version:
[https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec-
latest&os=andro...](https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec-
latest&os=android&lang=multi)

------
ln_00
Finally. The notifications popup is seriously annoying.

~~~
all_blue_chucks
What we really need in these permission popups is the ability to say "no to
all permissions from Gawker Media brands" and the problem would be mostly
solved.

~~~
dannyw
What we really need:

* Websites with notifications that are frequently denied by users, will lose the ability to request web notifications permissions. Users must manually enable it through Domain Settings.

------
harikb
What do people use for “Profiles”. I need ability to switch easily between
profiles (different identities) without going to command line. I also don’t
want to install a third party extension for that if possible

~~~
thatcherc
Firefox has a Container Tabs extension which does just this - the defaults are
profiles for Work, Personal, Banking, and Social, and you can add more. You do
have to install it but I think the extension is from Mozilla itself, so it's
not exactly third-party. It's just features that are already in the nightly
builds as I understand it [0]. Personally I've really enjoyed it so far!

[0] - [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers)

~~~
Vinnl
Additionally, the actual functionality is just built into Firefox; all the
extension does is expose a UI to manage it.

~~~
ilikepi
The extension also allows you to set that a particular site be assigned to,
and automatically open in, a given container. I don't believe this particular
feature is built into Firefox.

~~~
Vinnl
Indeed, it's just the containerisation functionality and assigning a tab to
open in a Container that's built in; actually initiating the opening is done
by the extension, e.g. when you navigate to a specific origin.

------
kbutler
The new notification request behavior is great (speech bubble in URL bar,
instead of a popup [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-
requests...](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-requests/)).
Much better than the ubiquitous popup asking if a site could give you
popups...

------
mxmilkb
Can anyone advise how far away hardware accelerated video on Linux might be?

~~~
padenot
We're currently rewriting most of the graphics rendering of Firefox (with what
is called the WebRender project). This is the first time Linux users will have
hardware accelerated rendering by default, and is a pre-requisite to take real
advantage of hardware-accelerated video decoding. It's enabled on some
configuration in Nightly builds [0], and it's being worked on actively. If you
want to know more, the graphics teams has a blog where updates are
periodically posted about what is happening, often with interesting insight
about the innards of a web browser rendering stack [1].

Once rendering is hardware accelerated, it makes sense to look into hardware
video decoding. Doing hardware video decoding without hardware rendering
roughly means we need to read back from GPU memory into main memory, composite
the image in software, and then upload back to the GPU to display, which is
super super inefficient.

[0]:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where)
[1]: [https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/](https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/)

~~~
breakingcups
Thanks a lot for hanging out and answering question.

------
2bitencryption
I'm a huge fan of the picture-in-picture, though I wish for a few
enhancements:

I wish clicking anywhere on the box would act as "play/pause", instead of
requiring me to hunt down the button. And of course I wish for some
visible/interactable buffer-bar, though I realize that might not be
standardized across webplayers, so maybe not possible.

~~~
pkulak
I just wish they would enable VAAPI video decoding in Linux.

------
pzmarzly
I find Firefox and Thunderbird amazing, I just miss being able to customize
keyboard shortcuts. Thunderbird ones are especially evil (they don’t use any
modifier like Ctrl, so I often mess my inbox up when I don’t notice
Thunderbird is the focused window). Also, while Firefox for iOS is leagues
ahead of e.g. Brave, it still has many issues.

------
hackinthebochs
Has firefox fixed video playback on sites like instagram and gfycat yet? Their
mp4 playback was broken for a significant number of videos last time I
attempted to update. I'm still on an FF version 10 versions back because of
their atrocious compatibility with mp4s (which is still incompatible, but less
so).

~~~
zcdziura
What have you noticed about mp4 video playback that is broken? I've used
Firefox as my daily driver for many, many years (even before the Quantum
updates) and have never noticed any playback errors.

~~~
hackinthebochs
It simply doesn't work for some non-trivial amount of videos, e.g. some
instagram stories or gfycat mp4s. If you load the link directly in the browser
it will say the file is corrupt. Loading the same link in chrome plays fine.

~~~
padenot
Would you mind filing a bug at [0] with the content of about:support and maybe
a link or two where it doesn't work? Happy to have an initial look into this
(I work on the media team at Mozilla).

[0]:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=Audio%2FVideo%3A%20playback),
you can log in with a github account or create one

~~~
yoasif_
I suspect this user is on Linux and doesn't have h.264 codecs installed.

They should be able to do this fairly easily -- two distros here:

[https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats)

[https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-
docs/assembly_ins...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-
docs/assembly_installing-plugins-for-playing-movies-and-music/)

------
krbzsq
Okay, so I don't really post to HN and this may seem like a silly complaint
but Firefox's management of theming just seems off to me. I use macOS, I don't
fiddle about with my wallpaper very much and so this stains Firefox's top bar
with an ugly brown tint. I could switch to the light theme, however when I do
so Firefox no longer respects my system change to dark mode.

Does anyone else get bothered by this? Is there any way around this? I'm not
an aesthetics person by any means but this is quite annoying. It's a fantastic
browser other than this, I've been a user for as long as I can remember.

I'm sure you can probably modify userChrome and all this and I've not really
tried because I'm not _THAT_ bothered by it, but surely there should be a way
to set your preferred themes for light & dark?

~~~
zamadatix
If I'm reading your correctly you'd like to set FF to the light theme (or any
theme) but continue to have dark mode pages? about:config browser.in-
content.dark-mode true should do that.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
I highly recommend dark-reader:
[https://darkreader.org/](https://darkreader.org/)

------
m_eiman
I just upgraded my iMac to Catalina, and noticed this rather serious issue
with Firefox:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620)

Basically if you have an external screen (possibly related to it being low-DPI
and main screen being Retina), context menus don't work properly, if at all.

It seems it got even worse in 72 than it was in 71 - now I'm not even getting
a context menu in the wrong place, it's invisible (maybe off-screen?).

Hopefully someone who works on Firefox can see this and fix it - it's making
Firefox nearly unusable as is :(

~~~
w-m
Ah, that's this 20 year old bug, that predates Mac OS X, striking again:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572)

------
zelly
Firefox's killer feature was generating sync keys locally and letting you
self-host a compatible sync host.

Chrome generates the sync keys on server and has proprietary sync software.

That's it. That's all it took for me to switch. I know FF eats almost double
the CPU compared to Chrome. I know 1 out of every 10 webapps will just not
work in it. That's fine. I will take the security and privacy over
convenience.

Just buy a better CPU.

~~~
aequitas
> Just buy a better CPU.

This gets a little hard when the device you want to run FF on is a old laptop
that doesn't need replacing and where battery life is more important than raw
speed.

------
DyslexicAtheist
2 grave security/privacy issues in Firefox right now (both are still open
after more than 1 year):

 _Firefox Installs non-free binaries from Cisco and Google again_
[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582)

 _firefox: Safe Browsing updates fail due to insufficient quota on the Google
API key_ [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147)

Just recently I discovered DoH was activated by default now and bypassing my
/etc/hosts block list without any warning. This opened me up to tracking from
sites I thought I had blocked.

In all above cases the failure-modes are insecure. It's like a firewall that
suddenly switches its enforcement policy from a _deny-all+whitelisting_ to
_allow-all+blacklisting_ without properly informing users.

Totally unacceptable!

~~~
Ygg2
Is this related to Firefox DRM implementation?

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
no. see this post which has meanwhile hit the frontpage for better discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990505)

~~~
opencl
The non-free binary _is_ the DRM implementation.

The bug also mentions openh264 but it's BSD licensed so I'm confused as to why
anyone considers it non-free.

------
nailer
Still hanging out for Replay, which if it gets into mainline Firefox, will
easily make the FF the best JS development environment:
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/WebReplay)

------
benboughton1
Firefox is great on desktop. I use it 95+% of time. But it is not so good on
Android. Ebay is great example. Most of the time, go to page 2 of search
results and you get no listings. I want to use Firefox on mobile as it syncs
my bookmarks and passwords but things like this are frustrating.

~~~
yoasif_
Try Firefox Preview:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix)

------
mwexler
I appreciate all the upgrades, but I keep finding that Firefox is abysmal for
battery life, even the versions that supposedly have focused on this issue.
Have folks found ways to reduce it's power consumption on OSX?

~~~
ntp85
Have you tried one of the more recent versions? Power consumption should have
been reduced by using the CoreAnimation framework on macOS.

~~~
mwexler
There is improvement, but it's gone from somewhat unusable to just abysmal, at
least in my environment. YMMV, of course.

------
cjauvin
I too would like to join the bandwagon of people happily switching from Chrome
to Firefox (mainly for ethical reasons at this point). However, I am on Linux
(Ubuntu 19.04 on a desktop machine) and last time I tried (around FF 70 I
believe, maybe 2 months ago), I experienced horrible system-wide lockups,
requiring hard reboots (I was surprised to discover that it's even still
possible, nowadays). It probably doesn't help that I'm doing web development
with React, and thus I'm heavily using some dev tools, but still.. Anyone
would have any clue about this?

~~~
mixmastamyk
What video hardware do you have? Perhaps updating the driver. Fsck might help
as well.

------
felixfoertsch
Can anybody share some insight as to why the PiP mode is implemented non-
natively? Both macOs and Windows have a system PiP mode that should be usable?

------
abcd_f
Re: picture in picture - anyone else here think that this feature doesn't
belong to a browser? It just seems so... erm... random, basically.

Looks like something that was cloned from some other product and rather
crudely shoehorned in. At the very least it should have been introduced after
an update and given an option to _opt-in_ to using it, rather than
automatically enabling it without any notice.

~~~
jvzr
I love it and use it multiple (25+) times per day. My only wish is that it
kept the interface from whichever player the videos comes from (eg. YouTube's,
Netflix's, etc., especially for subtitles & platform-specific controls like
Speed)

~~~
jannes
If Firefox kept any website-controlled interface it would give websites an
opportunity to block the feature by overlaying it with a black rectangle.

Most content providers probably don't like this feature.

------
goodguy1234
I still dont get why firefox is 1 to 2 seconds slow doing everything.

We already have uorgin block and https everywhere and privacy beaver.

They just want to make their browser even more bloated.

And lets not even talk about linux distro. On my xubuntu its even slower than
chromium or chrome.

Here is my advice: Invest everything on speed. Your user already know about
privacy and stuff. That why less than 9% of us are left.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Check the network panel. See the Megabytes of html and js a browser needs to
work with.

It’s a miracle that browsers can render all that in the seconds it usually
takes them, and if Chrome is a second faster, it’s due to the billion $
company behind investing the GPD of a medium-sized country into optimizing it.

------
rafaelvasco
Switched to Firefox in my current machine. Never looked back. Before i used
Chrome, Yandex, Opera, Vivaldi.. I'm good with FF for now.

------
dang
Related: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/firefox-72-our-first-
song-...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/firefox-72-our-first-song-
of-2020/)

(via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981817)).

------
saturn_vk
It doesn't seem like you can set the pip window to be sticky across all
desktops. That's unfortunate and a bit unusable

~~~
Siecje
What is the pip window?

~~~
adventured
Picture in picture window.

It can create, for example, a pop-out video overlay, which can be moved around
and resized. It then sits over top of the other content on the page (and
remains over other tabs) and will remain fixed as you scroll down the page and
similar. On a site like YouTube, you could pop the video out and proceed to
scroll down and interact with comments while the video plays to the side or
above.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-
picture-f...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-
firefox)

------
vrsfvwae5tbh
Interestingly the beta for 73.0 [1] includes NextDNS as a second choice for
DNS over HTTPS providers as well as Cloudflare.

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/)

~~~
0xffff2
How do I make sure that Mozilla is respecting my OS DNS settings and not using
DNS over HTTPS at all?

~~~
zamadatix
If you want it to just always use what you've configured and not have to
follow the changes they make you can set network.trr.mode to 5 in
about:config. 5 signifies "off by choice"

If you just want to know how to toggle it normally in case something goes
weird with one of the changes it's in the network settings part of the
settings page.

------
donmcronald
> User research commonly brings up permission prompt spam as a top user
> annoyance

What's user research?

Jokes aside, my favorite feature in Firefox is the good old-fashioned search
box. I use Bing by default and repeat searches on Google or Duck Duck Go if I
don't find results right away.

~~~
mey
Have you found Bing more desirable than DuckDuckGo for a specific reason?
(Uses DuckDuckGo and liberal use of the bangs when things don't come up as
expected)

~~~
war1025
I've used Yahoo since the early 2000s and never hopped on the Google
bandwagon.

The times Ive tried to find things in Google because "people say it has better
search", I've not had much luck. Possibly because they don't have extensive
data on me and my search preferences?

I think Yahoo is backed by Bing these days? I always find its search results
perfectly adequate.

~~~
iudqnolq
By the way, DDG is also essentially entirely backed by bing. Bing except ddg
for bangs is pretty much the same as just DDG.

------
huntermeyer
How many logos does Firefox have?

------
ekns
Switched to Firefox recently on my desktop. I had the strangest problem with
Chrome: Somehow it just kept forking more and more processes until the rlimit
got filled (100k+ threads/processes).

Too much trouble to debug it so I opted to switch instead.

------
aprvchndrs
Finally Picture in Picture on MacOS.

The last reason for me to keep using Safari/Chrome is gone.

~~~
felixfoertsch
I was missing that one too and did some research about it a while ago. You can
achieve the system-wide PiP mode in Safari with a bookmarklet. I posted the
guide here: [https://felixfoertsch.github.io/tip/2019/02/15/use-pip-
via-b...](https://felixfoertsch.github.io/tip/2019/02/15/use-pip-via-
bookmarklet.html)

~~~
aprvchndrs
PiP worked in Safari with an extension[0] right? That's why I was still using
it for YouTube streaming in the background.

I've switched to Firefox on almost every other platform (apart from iOS). with
Firefox 72, I've switch to Firefox only on MacOS as well.

[0]:[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-nearly-
every-...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-nearly-every-
video/id1160374471?mt=12)

------
shmerl
Looking forward to video decoding (and encoding) hardware acceleration through
VAAPI in Firefox on Linux. Now that WebRender is already in the codebase, at
least doing it for WebRender path would be very welcome.

------
muchogris
The one-click search icons have been removed from the adress bar to the search
bar? I cant tell if this is a hidden design feature that does not appear on
the release notes, but it sure will bother me...

------
martin-adams
"Say goodbye to annoying notification requests (unless you want them)"

For a moment I thought they had done this for the cookie and privacy notices.
Oh how that would be amazing to move that functionality into the browser.

~~~
brink
The "I don't care about cookies" extension is a nice solution for now.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-
care-a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-
cookies/)

------
IshKebab
Does fingerprint blocking just use a blacklist, like ad blockers? Seems like a
pretty lame approach. Shouldn't they focus on approaches that work for all
future scripts? I.e. making browsers seem less unique.

~~~
GlitchMr
It's complicated. There is in fact a hidden option that makes the web browser
less unique, but using it has side-effects such as retrieving pages in English
with UTC timezone, noticeably reducing the browser view point size, breaking
WebGL, break some JavaScript using <canvas> and most notably, making the web
browser noticeably slower. It's not something that a web browser can afford to
have without informing the user of the consequences. Not to mention without
additional measures, this is unlikely to help much against fingerprinting.

You are probably better of using Tor Browser.

------
maljx
Unfortunately the font rendering is still not up to Chromes, a lot of sites
look weird. Fastmail for instance is rendered with a visibly smaller font on
FF, and it looks blurry on FF. (Win10).

------
egberts1
What the hey? No hash values posted after downloading the Firefox binary.

How can we tell that we got the real deal, especially if the original Firefox
binary got compromised?

------
mderazon
Only thing keeping me in Chrome is multiple profiles

And no, Firefox containers are not the same, I cannot install two versions for
1pass - personal/private

Firefox also have true "profiles" but they are kind of a hack

~~~
zamadatix
The profiles are fine it's the lack of integrated GUI that kills it. Just need
the ability to launch a different profile in a new window from an existing
window and it'd be all set.

It drives me nuts because I have things in FF that can't easily be handled by
containers and I have things in Chrome that can't easily be handled by
profiles.

------
amelius
Password fields are broken in Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome Flashback Metacity), when
using Firefox's Sync feature, (and without add-ons).

This was a problem in recent versions, and is still a problem in version 72.

~~~
muktupavels
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
flashback/+b...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
flashback/+bug/1836659)

~~~
amelius
Thanks!

------
jevgeni
Now if they include a way to block modal subscribe-to-our-bullshit-newsletter
pop-ups, it would be the world's most perfect browser.

------
grenoire
What's the criteria for FF bumping its major versions? Looks to me like these
release announcements are getting much more frequent.

Edit: Answered by zamadatix.

~~~
jdlyga
They're moving to a monthly system. Continuous integration, continuous
delivery I guess.

------
Siecje
The only thing that doesn't work in Firefox is exec in the kubernetes
dashboard. I have to switch to Chromium when I need to do that.

~~~
digitarald
Could you file an issue here?
[https://webcompat.com/issues/new](https://webcompat.com/issues/new)

------
otanriverdi
It's great to see Firefox improving constantly. Especially since Chrome is
unusable on MacOS Catalina for many users atm.

~~~
kmlx
?

i'm using the latest macos and chrome. what exactly isn't supposed to be
working?

i also have firefox installed, but on macos firefox is mostly an
alpha/unfinished release since years ago.

~~~
otanriverdi
Well I'm having both the smooth scrolling bug and the constant beach ball of
death for 5 seconds issue on my macbook.

------
alistproducer2
I switched to ff a couples years ago and up until the last few months
everything has been great. Now a lot of important sites don't work because the
content security policy is completely inflexible. It should allow me to make
exceptions on sites I chose. I've had to install chrome just for a couple
sites and now its just easier to make chrome my daily driver again. The ff
team should consider making the CSP flexible.

~~~
saghm
Out of curiosity, what sites did you have trouble with? I also switched to
Firefox a year or two ago, and I haven't had anything noticeably break
recently, so I'm curious if I'm just not going to the sites that have issues
or if there's something else different in my config that solves it.

------
perlpimp
am slightly dismayed that to this day on macOS I can't use back and forward
buttons even if I redefine them in karabiner. it works with other browsers,
seems that autoscroll feature is no degrading gracefully when you disable it.

~~~
gdw2
I mapped my mouse's back button to backspace and it works okay in FF.

------
lai
I only use FF on mobile because I can run the uBlock extension on it.

------
shd4
Nightly is now 74.0a1 (major versions get released every 4 to 5 weeks).

------
jcoffland
The only feature I really want FF to bring back is multi-row tabs.

------
skywal_l
With websocket frames !

------
svnpenn
Dont forget that if you manually update, Firefox destroys your update
settings:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400)

------
JoeMayoBot
Haven't been paying attention or keeping up and noticed the version number is
72. One thought is "Wow - that's a lot" and another is "That doesn't sound
like semantic versioning."

~~~
p1necone
Semantic versioning doesn't make sense for user facing software. Maintaining
API compatibility on the software -> user interface isn't really a
problem/doesn't make sense compared to software -> software interfaces.

~~~
pc2g4d
Firefox exposes APIs that other software builds on. Seems like semantic
versioning would make sense for them.

------
dsirola
I really like Firefox, but I had to switch back to Chrome because of resource
usage. After using it for some time it got up to 3GB RAM consumption for a
single tab with no plugins.

------
takeda
For the love of what's holy, I think the versioning system adopted by all
browsers is just crazy.

~~~
WorldMaker
Numbers aren't exactly a finite resource [1] and there's no particular reason
that version numbers have to "stay small" other than aesthetics.

[1] Mathematically positive natural numbers are infinite. Realistically, most
systems traditionally implement version numbers as sets of at least 16-bit
numbers and there are 65,536 numbers to choose from, not just the first ten or
so.

------
floatingsmoke
Still no pinch to zoom. No chance on macOS.

~~~
vardump
Just set "apz.allow_zooming" to true in about:config. Pinch zoom works for me
on macOS at least, didn't try on Windows yet. Works smoothly, just like in
Safari and Chrome.

Perhaps there are still some minor bugs and they don't enable it by default?

~~~
floatingsmoke
Nice try. It works by pinching but double tap and smart zoom to cursor.

And if you zoom in somehow, you cannot pan over the page because Firefox act
like you are seeing full screen and trying to go back or forward in browser
history.

~~~
vardump
> And if you zoom in somehow, you cannot pan over the page because Firefox act
> like you are seeing full screen and trying to go back or forward in browser
> history.

Need to first pan at least a bit vertically, then it allows horizontal
panning. But yeah, clearly not a finished feature yet. Still nice to see
there's progress, and it's already mostly usable with the mentioned caveats.

~~~
floatingsmoke
> Need to first pan at least a bit vertically

Thinking of it, it would even be a nice feature since we need to pan to the
left of the page or zoom out completely to go back in history with touch pad
in Chromium based browsers.

> Still nice to see there's progress, and it's already mostly usable with the
> mentioned caveats.

At least.

Next release should definitely have this double-tap and smart-zoom feature.

------
happppy
honestly I gave Firefox a try but it didn't work for me. I am using Chrome.

------
yori
After the recent missteps by Chrome (mangling the display of URLs), I decided
to switch to Firefox and DuckDuckGo a few months ago and I was pleasantly
surprised at how fast Firefox is these days than what I found it to be 10
years ago.

While I still consider DuckDuckGo to be in the "not bad" category, Firefox is
in the "seriously awesome" category now.

If you have been away from Firefox for a while like me, give it another shot.
It won't disappoint you for sure.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Are you a devtools user? How do the Firefox ones compare? I speak as someone
who originally switched to Chrome (having been a Firefox user since the
Phoenix days!) specifically for the devtools — it's pretty much the biggest
factor in my browser choice.

~~~
makepanic
Sadly, the performance inspector is still pretty useless compared to what
Chromium is offering.

~~~
leeoniya
this is the biggest blocker for me. i still use ff as my main browser, but i
cannot develop with it, so i have to spend a lot of my time in chrome.

we had a recent dialog about it here:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ecyhmr/mozilla_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ecyhmr/mozilla_survey_how_can_devtools_support_you/fbez5c0/)

there's some cool stuff in the works but it doesnt sound like there's a plan
to internalize the work into devtools but to keep it as a web app and rely on
a serviceworker for "localness" \- not great, imo.

~~~
digitarald
Thanks again for that discussion, it already spawned some follow up.

------
meerita
My favorite browser since 2017. I don't miss Chrome for anything.

~~~
giancarlostoro
My favorite since the 2000's (idk when I started using it, mom didnt let me
install it on the home computer for ages) I tried Chrome earlier on but (and
I've said this on HN before) it didnt have adblock, then when it did, it was
crippled. I never went back.

~~~
zamadatix
Chrome still hasn't pushed Manifest v3, it's using the exact same web block
extension APIs as Firefox right now.

~~~
Vinnl
It decrippled it later, but initially, adblockers in Chrome could only hide
ads, not prevent them from loading.

------
Adoum
I'am my friend in member in you.

------
nabergh
My biggest gripe with Firefox is how it opens tabs. If I open a new tab in
Chrome, it opens just to the right of the current one which is nice because it
keeps related tabs together. In Firefox it opens to the far right which is
annoying. I tried installing an extension to fix this but it was buggy. Only
recently did I discover that I could dig into about:config to enable the
behavior I consider expected (and I'm sure most people agree with me given how
many Chrome users there are).

~~~
40four
I already updated to v.72 so I don't know if they changed the default, never
really noticed before. But now

    
    
      browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
    

defaults to 'true'. I agree this is expected behavior :)

~~~
megous
That only applies when you open a tab by clicking on a link. If you do ctrl+t,
you'll get new tab at the far right.

~~~
the_duke
That is toggled by "browser.tabs.insertAfterContent" ( vs
insertRelatedAfterContent).

~~~
lorenzhs
You have a typo there, it's browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent and
browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent (Current, not Content), just in case
someone tries to copy and paste those into about:config

------
alf-pogz
I use the Brave browser now, and I have no interest in going back to Firefox
or Chrome at this point.

~~~
justusthane
Good for you. I prefer to use a browser not based on Chromium.

