
Firefox 70 - feross
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/10/firefox-70-a-bountiful-release-for-all/
======
kemenaran
Not mentioned in this article (although it's in the Release Notes [1]): the
amazing work done regarding the macOS compositor.

This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina
Macbooks.

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new)

~~~
chrischen
Battery life is my primary concern, and unless they release battery life
benchmarks I’d be hard pressed to switch off of Safari.

~~~
Scarbutt
Safari means no ublock, the web without is annoying.

~~~
lpuerto
There are other options (paid ones) that are equal —or even better since they
are quite automatic— than ublock.

The only two things I'm missing in safari to be hones are:

\- A no-script extension or similar.

\- Sync part of my work is on a no macOS machines I don't have safari there,
so no sync. I partially overcome this with bookmaster for bookmarks, but I
still missing tabs and read it later list. However, firefox doesn't have this
later feature on desktop —and I don't why.

~~~
techwizrd
Firefox Sync syncs your tabs, bookmarks, passwords, etc. Your read it later
list is synced through Pocket (which is owned by Mozilla). They exist on
desktop and mobile.

~~~
moystard
Still using pinboard; one of the best investment I made in my entire life.

------
freediver
I am not a Firefox user but know that matching Webkit performance on macOS is
going to be very hard.

So just fired a test on my Macbook Air - Safari 13 vs Firefox 70.

Opened top 10 links from techmeme. Both windows in background.

Firefox 70: Energy use 30-200; CPU 20-25%; Threads 82

Safari 13: Energy use 0.1-5; CPU 2-5%; Threads 11

If this is to celebrate I can only imagine what the things looked like before
this release. Save for Apple fiddling with the energy use numbers (VW style)
this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari. Can
anyone replicate this for the sake of argument?

Edit: uploaded screenshots
[https://imgur.com/a/4L64ShP](https://imgur.com/a/4L64ShP)

~~~
jacurtis
> this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari

Well it might last 4-5x longer if you run safari in the background, since that
is what you tested. But wouldn't the real test be running both browsers as the
active window and comparing those results?

One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud of)
is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and windows
to nearly zero. This is really good when running on battery because it is a
shame to dedicate resources to things that aren't even visible on screen. But
this could make the results far more dramatic through your test.

I would hypothesize that Safari still wins your performance test (if you were
to re-test using them both as "active" windows), but probably not as
dramatically as in the inactive window test.

~~~
tomaskafka
> One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud
> of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and
> windows to nearly zero.

I understand this is rare, but I just have a very very hard time understanding
what is so hard about this.

Page not visible? Just stop it. Stop the layout engine, stop the javascript
VM. If there was a transfer in progress, let it finish, a page might get the
callback when it's active again ...

(I know there are some tricky cases, a lot of them, but there just isn't any
reason why a browser with 30 tabs should be consuming over 1 % cpu...)

~~~
pmontra
YouTube music video running in another tab. Should it stop render the video
and keep playing the audio? Maybe feasible but it should keep receiving both
the video and audio data. Stop all of it? Not what I wish to happen.

~~~
dwaite
The javascript engine and rendering engines are what are generally affected by
being backgrounded. So yes, generally the media library will continue
receiving the combined video/audio stream and not bother rendering the video
frames

~~~
roca
Youtube uses the Media Source Extensions API, which means that JS is
responsible for fetching compressed video data and feeding it into the
decoder, so it can implement adaptive streaming. Pause JS for more than a few
seconds and the video will stop playing.

~~~
dwaite
Yes, and this is likely why Youtube now periodically pauses in the background
on current macOS/Safari.

------
tyre
> Firefox 70 introduces three new properties related to text
> decoration/underline:

> text-decoration-thickness: sets the thickness of lines added via text-
> decoration.

> text-underline-offset: sets the distance between a text decoration and the
> text it is set on. Bear in mind that this only works on underlines.

> text-decoration-skip-ink: sets whether underlines and overlines are drawn if
> they cross descenders and ascenders. The default value, auto, causes them to
> only be drawn where they do not cross over a glyph. To allow underlines to
> cross glyphs, set the value to none.

I'm so excited for these. Implementing sane underlines for headers has been a
pain in the ass for far too long. Writers rejoice!

~~~
frereubu
Don't want to rain on your parade, but this is a long way from being generally
available: [https://caniuse.com/#search=text-decoration-
thickness](https://caniuse.com/#search=text-decoration-thickness)

11% coverage, and almost all of that is iOS Safari.

~~~
frenchyatwork
This is one of these cases though, were coverage doesn't really matter. The
fall-back is fairly reasonable.

~~~
frereubu
That's true, but if I used all CSS properties with this amount of coverage it
would cause a lot of extra work for very little gain. If this is something
that really gets your goat, and you use Firefox, perhaps it's worth it to
scratch the itch, but otherwise pretty useless currently.

~~~
Vinnl
But if you'd otherwise use border-bottom hacks, this is a good reason to stop
doing those and just have Chrome users live with the not-terrible default
underline until Chrome supports those properties as well.

------
doesnt_know
Links for the password manager, "Firefox Lockwise" go through adjust, which
appears to be a tracking/analytics/marketing platform. This is both through
their website and by clicking through the Firefox UI menu.

I guess it's harder to walk the walk yourself when the desires to track usage
and analytics come from within your own teams.

Check the links yourself over at:

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/lockwise/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/lockwise/)

And built in to Firefox by going about:logins, the top right __* menu and
clicking Lockwise for Android or Lockwise for iPhone

You end up with redirect links like:

[https://app.adjust.com/6tteyjo?redirect=](https://app.adjust.com/6tteyjo?redirect=)

~~~
tom-khagai
To be fair, it's common practice to measure marketing campaign effectiveness.
Mozilla doesn't hide that they share data to "Measure and support our
marketing"

"Campaign and Referral Data: This helps Mozilla understand the effectiveness
of our marketing campaigns."

"On iOS and Android: Firefox by default sends mobile campaign data to Adjust,
our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Mobile campaign data
includes a Google advertising ID, IP address, timestamp, country,
language/locale, operating system, and app version. Read the documentation."

Src: [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/privacy/firefox/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/)

~~~
jedimastert
I mean, they act like all of the info Google takes in goes straight to ads,
when a lot of it goes to it's analytics platform

~~~
vanderZwan
I fail to see how the latter prevents the former. This is digital information
that can be copied endlessly, not a physical object that can only be owned by
one entity at a time.

~~~
jedimastert
Google doesn't share data between Analytics and Ads behind the scenes, only if
you set it up through the the site owner and it doesn't go through to other
sites.

------
ar7hur
The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker.
Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between
languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right
language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss
something?

~~~
ronjouch
Please vote and/or speak up (constructively, no "mee too" comments please) on
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687)

~~~
dblohm7
Go ahead and vote if you wish, but please do not add “me too” comments to our
bug tracker.

~~~
ronjouch
Thanks for the reminder. I edited my above message to reflect the same
sentiment.

------
danShumway
> Pause on DOM Mutation in Debugger

Heckin finally!

The dev tool improvements all seem good. Still no support for inline code
edits, which means JS debugging will still be something of a pain, but
strengthening Firefox's position as one of the better tools for debugging and
prototyping CSS.

~~~
Timothycquinn
Saw that too. What a wicked feature. Will make reverse engineering and
debugging other peoples code much much easier!

------
Klonoar
Switching to CoreAnimation is very, very nice - however, this still doesn't
feel quite at home on macOS because of a bug that's pretty old at this point.

Overflow/rubberband scrolling needs to be added here, because that is how
scrolling is supposed to work on macOS. If you don't have it, you feel very
alien. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't fixed after all these years,
especially since Chrome managed to do it - it's not like an open source
implementation doesn't exist at this point to crib the math from.

~~~
dstaley
Firefox still doesn't render native OS elements like select boxes and right-
click menus, so I have little faith overflow scrolling will ever be fixed.

~~~
Klonoar
Yeah... Firefox is probably the biggest example of why you shouldn't reinvent
the wheel in terms of cross-platform GUI. It just looks and feels so out of
place, whether it's macOS or some niche setup like running it under KDE. If
you're in Gnome or Windows it can look fine, but I still question much of the
iconography and general layout.

Any time you bring it up, though, you get batted away and beaten over the head
with privacy, browser monoculture, or open source arguments. It's really
frustrating; if you want open source to succeed, you have to also want it to
compete on the same level.

It's like expecting people to eat vegan food when you call it the same as the
non-vegan option... and then they don't want to, because it tastes nothing
like what they expect.

In fact (I can't believe I'm saying this) I almost wish they were a Qt shell.

~~~
roca
Every browser reimplements the native platform widgets. Even Safari! You have
to, because the native platform widgets never support all the features a
browser needs (CSS styling, JS event interception, etc etc).

Unfortunately, copying the look and feel of the native platform is an endless
treadmill as those platforms evolve, and for obvious reasons Safari is always
going to be better at keeping up with that on Mac than Firefox is.

~~~
Klonoar
Dude, I know - read my original comment, I'm clearly aware that Chrome had to
implement their side of things.

Firefox goes out of their way to draw controls that don't fit in. Chrome, for
all their faults, tries very hard to emulate the proper
look/feel/functionality.

~~~
roca
AFAIK Firefox does not "go out of their way to draw controls that don't fit
in". On Mac and other platforms, the policy is that the controls look and feel
like their native counterparts (unless overidden by Web authors) ... unless
it's changed since I left Mozilla, and I don't think it has. In some cases,
however, that has not been achieved. I haven't had a Mac for long time so I
can't speak to the details of what works and what doesn't.

FWIW I use Linux and on Linux, Chrome makes no attempt at all to use the
native platform theme, while Firefox does a pretty good job.

~~~
Klonoar
It's pretty off on Mac, sadly.

I will, however, apologize for saying they "go out of their way". I fired that
bit of text off without thinking, but it's needlessly assuming (and likely
outright wrong) on my part. Thanks for the correction.

------
theodorejb
Wow, blown away by how much better the new password manager is! If they add
support for custom fields on each login, this could almost completely replace
my need for a 3rd party solution.

~~~
taco_emoji
Couple other features I'd like: \- Import from other formats (Keepass, or at
least any format Keepass can export to) \- Share items with someone else

~~~
justusthane
I'm blown away that there's no import yet. How else am I going to switch from
another password manager?

I also saw a comment from the dev team that they're "aware" of the need for
such a feature but it's not on a road map yet.

------
submeta
Love the new mission statement: `Firefox is tech that fights for your online
privacy.`

Apple has demonstrated that privacy is a very effective value proposition.
Maybe Apple should look into investing in Mozilla/Firefox.

~~~
saagarjha
But they ship their own browser?

~~~
djsumdog
Yea and they don't allow Firefox on iOS, even though Google allows it on
Android and they too have their own browser!

~~~
Margh
firefox (and lockwise) are very much on iOS and very well integrated with the
system.

~~~
roca
Firefox on iOS is Webkit wrapped in a Firefox UI shell. It does not use Gecko,
and so is very different from desktop and Android Firefox, much more like
Safari actually.

------
burtonator
Firefox + Mozilla are awesome. I still have a Mozilla 1.0 t-shirt from the
first release party!

I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is
that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy.

However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google
Chrome).

They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with
companies like Google.

So to say that Firefox doesn't really have ads I think it is a bit
disingenuous. They don't have ads directly but they benefit directly from the
ecosystem.

Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist.

Not saying this to be rude or call you guys out. I think we need an honest
discussion on this issue.

Across the industry, we see users just outright refusing to pay for products
because they're accustomed to 'free' being the norm.

News, social media, browsers, etc.

If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else.

If Facebook tried to charge users they would revolt.

Same thing for browsers.

Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that
they're privacy is being sold.

I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers
paid directly for the product and _I_ was the customer (not the product).

~~~
rusk
> Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist

Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF
a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as
long as time itself (~25 years?)

What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003
to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in
this ...

Bit of a stretch to say FF wouldn’t have existed otherwise though. There was
very definitely some dissatisfaction across the board with IE dominance and
its not hard to imagine something like FF being inevitable.

~~~
metalliqaz
Most of Mozilla's funding came from Google in exchange for making Google the
default search page.

~~~
rusk
Right ...

It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from
somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the
David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole _”don’t be evil”_ thing?
Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.

~~~
Lio
There is also an argument that back in the day Firefox saved Google rather
than the other way around.

Why? Because when Microsoft had 90% browser share, gained through tying IE
directly into Windows, there was a very real chance that they could have
adapted IE so that it was harder to use Google than a default MS Bing search
engine.

Having a better, cross-platform alternative to IE allowed Google to stay in
the game and make use of FF's cutting edge features.

Remember the old Microsoft was quite happy to cripple Windows to kill it's
competitors. For example "Windows ain't done until WordPerfect won't run" and
the weird "errors" you saw if you tried running Windows on top of DR DOS.

~~~
mkl
I'm not sure that adds up. When Bing was introduced in mid-2009, IE had about
60% of the market, and it was dropping fast as Chrome's popularity exploded
[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:StatCounter-
browser-ww-monthly-200901-201905.png)

~~~
Lio
I believe that Microsoft’s interest in Google’s business predates the launch
of Bing. You can replace the brand name “Bing” with “some kind of
search/advertising/internet gateway” business.

Remember Microsoft used to be a very competitive outfit with a history of
using their dominance of desktop OSs to enter new markets.

It’s easy to forget that Microsoft of old were able to keep bankrolling loss
leaders to “cut off the oxygen”[1] of any market that they saw as threatening
Windows.

[1]
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/04/98/microso...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/04/98/microsoft/198390.stm)

------
submeta
Love Firefox. The philosophy, its snappiness, its many add-ons, the UI. - Glad
to have an alternative to Chrome! Keep up the good work, Mozilla & Firefox
team.

~~~
soulofmischief
_Glad to have an alternative to Chrome!_

Many would argue that Chrome is an alternative to Firefox, given that Firefox
predates Chrome as the first real viable browser alternative.

~~~
adamch
Historically, yes, that's true. But these days Chrome has a huge lead in the
market compared to every other browser, so FF is the alternative again.

------
marius_k
I noticed that firefox (dev edition) got rid of possibility to disable update
notifications. I prefer my browser to be updated from repository rather than
by itself. Did anyone has the same issue or found some workaround?

~~~
ben0x539
Surely if your package manager installs firefox into /usr or whatever, it's
not gonna be able to update itself either way, right?

~~~
dblohm7
Yes, distributes packages work differently.

------
aroman
> Lastly, Core Animation allows us to move rendered content around in the
> window cheaply. This is great for efficient scrolling. (Our current
> compositor does not yet make use of this capability, but future work in
> WebRender will take advantage of it.)

Oh I am so excited about this! Where can I follow along with this development?

------
lbotos
I recently switched to firefox to give it a try. Does anyone else 2x-3x their
video playback and notice the audio distortion in FF on mac? I've tried to
find some discussion or workarounds for it, but no dice. Hoping that maybe the
renderer in this release might help a little.

~~~
padenot
Yes, we (the media team at Mozilla) know about this, and we're having a look.

The algorithm we use it not the best (and I think it's not the only cause of
bad quality here), and we're investigating what to do.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267)
is where we track this issue.

------
ceronman
I recently tried Firefox again and I liked a lot. Only drawback for me at the
moment is the lack of hardware video decoding on Linux. I hope it arrives
soon.

~~~
pmtpmt
What does it mean?

~~~
Narishma
It decodes videos using the CPU, leading to a huge increase in power usage and
dropped frames if your CPU isn't fast enough.

------
grantcarthew
Tree Style Tab needs a top comment here: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

------
ufo
Does anyone know how Firefox Lockwise compares to other password managers? For
example, can it store additional notes next to the password?

~~~
mgbmtl
It does not allow notes, only login/password.

I use it to sync passwords with my phone. I like that I can use a fingerprint
to unlock the file on my phone (instead of passphrase). I used to put silly
passwords on sites I didn't care about (variants on a common password), but
now I systematically generate a random password for all sites because there is
no loss of convenience.

------
antoineMoPa
My message to the team would be: Please bring back the shader editor in
devtools.

In a previous release, we had access to live reloading shader editor, which
was really useful in my case, developing real time WebGL apps. It was a truly
nice developer feature.

------
soulofmischief
_Permission requests can no longer be made while in fullscreen mode_

This is great news. What a huge security hole that has been.

------
kizer
Mozilla won't quit - I love it. We need a third browser engine in the game and
that should be sufficient as I've determined arbitrarily. There should be an
open source browser that's a little more amateur and "democratically
developed" than the big ones. Although browsers are approaching OSs in terms
of complexity (or already there). Tried switching back to FF a while back but
was still not as smooth as Chrome. I'll give it another shot. Good job,
Mozilla!

~~~
kizer
Just a slice of my stream of consciousness.

------
gorgoiler
So happy that Firefox is making steady progress.

I’m surprised though to see new CSS features so prominently in the
announcement. Doesn’t this add unwanted additional fragmentation to browser
CSS support?

A cosmetic feature like that naively seems better implemented with a library
rather than folding it straight into one particular browser, but maybe I’m
witnessing the process of text-underline-thickness being cemented in the
standard after years of such library-based support?

~~~
echelon
These look standard. Chrome already implements them:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-
decora...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-decoration-
skip-ink)

~~~
kemayo
text-decoration-thickness is the most niche, since the only other implementor
is Safari.

That said, yeah, they're all off the level 4 working draft, so they're
standards-track at least.

------
xyzal
How can I, as a mere user, support Mozilla (except spreading the word)? Is it
still true that their main source of income is a search agreement with Google?

~~~
roca
Yes, that is true.

You can donate money to Mozilla. However, what Mozilla needs more than
anything is more users, so spread the word!

------
torstenvl
Still has serious bugs with certificates that I don't think will ever be
fixed.

On Mac, loading all the appropriate DoD certs and trying to log into OWA
causes an unrecoverable hang.

Loading _only_ DOD ID SW CA-37 will allow login to numerous sites. However,
after closing those tabs, all _other_ sites time out while "Performing a TLS
handshake..."

Lastly, quitting Firefox after a PIV/CAC login causes an unrecoverable hang.

~~~
djsumdog
Have you filed a bug report on their bugzilla? Is there a way they can test
test certs? Are there public facing websites or are these all going to be
internal/government?

~~~
torstenvl
I've filed some bug reports but not others. The issue is it's such weird
behavior it's hard to isolate.

The issue seems to be related to PIV/CAC cards specifically, which obviously
increases the difficulty of anyone on the team replicating the bug.

------
SnowingXIV
How does Firefox Lockwise compare to 1Password and how does the ad/tracking
protection compare to using Chrome with uBlock Origin?

I do like how Firefox you can set to never auto play audio or video but the
chrome flag does not seem to prevent that. Haven't really given Firefox a
chance in easier and am pretty married to Chrome (especially with switching
profiles between work, personal that works very well).

------
lisper
> In the Firefox UI, you’ll then be able to generate a secure password like
> so:

That's great. But what if I now want to log in to the same site from my
iPhone?

~~~
treve
[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-
lockwise/id1314000270](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-
lockwise/id1314000270)

~~~
lisper
Thanks!

------
pedrocx486
Compared to current Chromium based browsers (I'm using Edge/ium), how does
this Firefox release's DevTools compare?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Some of those updates are to catch up to Chrome's developer tools. If I were
in charge of Firefox, I would honestly have them hire a developer or two to
focus solely on the Developer Tools. I'm sure there's many things that browser
developer tools could do that we have not even scratched the surface of. I
prefer Firefox overall, only use Chrome due to manager only looking at my work
on Chrome (it will be deployed in a WebKit container). The DOM Breakpoint
feature is one I found out this week about in Chrome, glad it's now in
Firefox.

~~~
bzbarsky
Firefox has an entire team dedicated to developer tools, fwiw. I'm not sure
whether your suggestion was "one or two more, in addition to the 7 or 8
already working on it", or "one or two more, instead of the 0 working on it
now"...

~~~
giancarlostoro
I'd happily add more people to the mix yeah, had no concept of how many were
working on it currently though, I assumed some people worked on it but not
dedicated. As I wrote my comment I realized that kind of tooling is not
necessarily easy to work on potentially.

------
ivanjaros
Since they censored Dissenter, they are dead to me. They can be the best web
browser ever made, but it will never touch the sillicon of my hard drives ever
again. With Goolag, at least I know where they stand and I know what to expect
from them. Mozilla betrayed my trust and I am not fan of second chances.

~~~
squiggleblaz
With Firefox, I'm mostly free. Alternatively, I can let Google be my feudal
overlord. Nothing Firefox prohibits is permitted by Google. Easy choice

------
drewg123
What's the state of saving & autofilling credit card info? That's the one
thing that keeps me going back to chrome (rather than typing in my card by
hand).

There are some bugs on this that look quite stale, and they don't seem
interested in finishing support, and its disabled by default..

~~~
majora2007
It's not on Chrome's level, but it does have autofill. I hope that is next on
their agenda. I love how Chrome prompts for security code and generates based
on that.

I switched over to FF recently and just use Chrome for password generation,
but looks like I can switch for good.

------
RedComet
Is Firefox's sandboxing on par with Chrome yet? And on Linux in particular?

~~~
dredmorbius
Containers. Better.

~~~
RedComet
I do like the containers feature, but I'm not referring to cross-site
sandboxing here.

~~~
dredmorbius
I don't know, though this Wiki entry seems to most generally address the
question. It references releases as recent as FF 60.

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox)

------
daveFNbuck
I just had f.lux turn on night mode after upgrading. Firefox 70 does not
handle this well. Some elements on most sites (including HN) randomly flash in
and out of nigh mode colors.

~~~
jonny383
Excuse my ignorance. What does Firefox have to do with f.lux? I thought f.lux
was a separate package that tinted colors on a level lower than the
applications themselves?

~~~
daveFNbuck
I thought so too, but the only time I've had this issue is after upgrading
Firefox today. It's not happening anymore, so I'll just chalk it up to a weird
one-off for now.

------
dlbucci
I had to stop using Firefox 70 Dev Edition because it made my 2015 Mac run out
of memory. Switching back to regular 69 fixed the issue, but I hope they have
corrected it by now...

------
dan-robertson
I’m a little surprised about the two word display specifiers (e.g. display:
inline flex). Specifically they say they are the only browser to support it
but I feel like I saw this somewhere (maybe in a nightly release of some
browser) at least two years ago.

Maybe I just saw a spec or maybe I’m just wrong

------
davidhyde
> Web socket inspector - In Firefox DevEdition, the Network monitor now has a
> new “Messages” panel, which appears when you are monitoring a web socket
> connection (i.e. a 101 response)

Yay, this is great news. Thanks guys! Nice to not have to revert to Chrome for
websocket debugging.

------
trilinearnz
Please excuse my ignorance, but why is this being published from
"hacks.mozilla.org"? Is that just the name of their technical blog? It sounds
like a platform that's more clandestine / unofficial to be used to announce a
public release.

~~~
skore
You do realize that you are writing this comment on a site literally called
"Hacker News", right?

(and yes, that is simply their technical blog)

~~~
trilinearnz
Yes, the irony of my comment did not escape me :) I guess I was just seeking
confirmation. Cheers.

------
tempodox
Does the mobile Firefox have something like the Developer Tools of the desktop
version? Because those are generally missing on mobile, I made my own site
that serves some JS to do (part of) what built-in developer tools would do.

------
jchook
> In supporting browsers (just Firefox at the time of writing), the single
> keyword values we know and love will map to new two-keyword values

Really neat how FireFox seems to push the web standards forward here, in a
world where Google seems to have total control.

------
gbuk2013
It will be interesting to see in the report which trackers sneak past my
uMatrix rules. :)

------
fiatjaf
The WebSocket inspector is very welcome!

Now, will it work for Server-Sent Events too?

------
meerita
It's been more than a year I've installed Firefox again and use it full time,
both in my phone and macbook. I feel like it's the perfect browser now. I want
even more privacy features and speed, more speed!

------
jangid
> hard to tell which script changed the page and caused the issue when you run
> into a problem

Firefox 70 is developer's delight. Breakpoints on DOM changes is the one of
the most difficult parts. FF70 solves this. Great.

------
mippenhappen
My main problem with Firefox is the audio modulation when you speed up sound.

I consume hours of video/audio content in my browser daily. Most of it I speed
up to 2x, and in Firefox my ears are destroyed if I do that.

------
xvilka
I wonder, why they implemented Baseline JS interpreter in C++? Why not Rust?

~~~
eyegor
I was under the impression that this was a side goal of the servo project. Of
course now it looks like it is it's own thing:
[https://servo.org/](https://servo.org/)

Does anyone know if servo is supposed to be related to Firefox in some way, or
if it is always meant to be independent?

~~~
timerol
Servo is supposed to be a playground of sorts for architectural innovations in
the browser space. Successful experiments from Servo will then get ported to
FF. Project Quantum ported over the Stylo CSS improvements from Servo:
[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-
en...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-engine-
quantum-css-aka-stylo/). WebRender has also been making it's way over:
[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-
maximum-f...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-
how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/)

------
Snd_
This is great news! I tried to switch to firefox to do my (frontend)
development in, but I noticed serious slowdowns compared to Chrome with
multiple tabs open. Going to give this another try!

------
maelito
If only a complete Firefox was made available for desktop Android...

------
Stormwalker
The onty thing I am missing is Lockwise quick access button plugin. Now if I
have to search for password, I have to open separate tab.

------
syphilis2
I like the text underlining options. But I wish the default CSS styling for
<a> tags used text-decoration-skip-ink: none; .

------
lukewrites
Firefox folks, I would _love_ to buy some FF stickers/swag. Is there anywhere
I can do that?

~~~
simcop2387
Looks like they used to have one, but it's been closed since 2016.
[https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-gear-store-s-last-
day/74...](https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-gear-store-s-last-day/7426)

I imagine it either cost too much to run or didn't bring in enough to justify
keeping it going unfortunately.

------
mschuetz
Finally, numeric separators!

------
The_rationalist
I would have wished a world where both the chromium project and Mozilla would
collaborate to a unified JS compiler instead of having two separate
implementations. How faster would have JS been? How more featureful and less
buggy?

BTW chrome 78 will be released today too!

~~~
SloopJon
On the contrary, I'd say that competition has been good for all involved. For
such a maligned language that was born in a little over a week, JavaScript is
better and faster than it has any right to be.

The amount of resources that have gone into improving JavaScript is amazing. I
just wonder what some other languages would look like now with that kind of
attention.

~~~
eyegor
Only a week? And I would slap python 3 right on top of that. Despite the
language being inherently messy and fully dynamic (similar to js), there are
tons of static analysis tools, compilers, alternate run times, IDEs, etc.

Edit: the "only a week?" question was genuine, it wasn't meant to be tongue in
cheek.

~~~
astine
" _There was a lot of internal pressure to pick one language as soon as
possible. Python, Tcl, Scheme itself were all possible candidates. So Eich had
to work fast. He had two advantages over the alternatives: freedom to pick the
right set of features, and a direct line to those who made the calls.
Unfortunately, he also had a big disadvantage: no time. Lots of important
decisions had to be made and very little time was available to make them.
JavaScript, a.k.a. Mocha, was born in this context. In a_ matter of weeks _a
working prototype was functional, and so it was integrated into Netscape
Communicator._ "

[https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-
javascript/](https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/)

Looks like it was pretty quick but maybe not just one week. Looks like Python
was actually considered, but bear in mind that this was 25 years ago. Python 3
certainly wasn't out yet and the available tool ecosystem was much more
limited.

~~~
BrendanEich
Do some elementary, Wikipedia-level research — Python was at 1.3 then if I
recall correctly. As I’ve written many times, the management order was “make
it look like Java”, so none of the languages you mentioned was practical. None
was practical anyway in terms of portability and safety from Windows 3.1 to
Mac CodeWarrior to a number of Unixes that still mattered to Netscape sales.
See/hear also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155).
See also [https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-
javascrip...](https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript-
with-brendan-eich/) — transcript below the fold.

------
qwerty456127
What about DNS over HTTP? Do I still have to use Nightly for that?

~~~
thenewnewguy
Settings -> Click "Settings" under network settings (bottom of "General"
section) -> Check "Enable DNS over HTTPS" -> Change provider (if you want a
different one).

------
pkaye
Is there a theme for Firefox that makes it look more like Chrome?

~~~
Vinnl
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/search/?platform=Li...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/search/?platform=Linux&q=chrome&type=statictheme)

------
mostlysimilar
Thanks for all of the hard work, Mozilla. You guys are heroes.

------
jeffhuys
Pinch-to-zooooooooom!!!!!!!!!! Finally. I will definitely try Firefox again
for a week or so, and see how it manages, battery-wise, compared to Safari.

~~~
gdsimoes
I just tried here and it’s not working. Do I need to change any settings?

~~~
ebrake
Pinch-to-zoom is still incomplete on Mac

------
jve
I'v been constantly trying to switch to FF from Chrome to help Firefox market
share a little bit. However there are always some issues which makes me switch
back to Chrome.

Currently I'm on Firefox for over the month and I did document those things
that bugs me. To be fair I should create such list for Chrome too, but I don't
get that moment of frustration that often.

Here's the list for Firefox. After some items I thought it would be better to
write down dates instead of sequence numbers.

Tldr: The most common issue is with unresponsive tabs which cannot be
reloaded/refreshed and leads to re-typing search term / closing, reopening tab
/ killing firefox.

\----------

1\. Searching google.. loading.. it is faster to open chrome then, try to copy
twice the URL (which doesn't copy/ paster), type in the search term manually
and process seach results than wait them appar on firefox. Reopening tab helps
on FF tho.

2\. Sometimes opening a url where server is cold, I get blank page after
waiting. Refresh wont help.

3\. CTRL + F sometimes won't work until deleting some chars. Chrome handles
this without issues.

4\. Opening site in new tab - Firefox hangs. Cannot switch to other tabs,
cannot close tab. End task via taskmgr helps.

5\. Opening site in some tab - Firefox shows loading, loading, loading. Only
closing tab, opening new one helps - site loads instantly.

6\. Cannot open link in Dynamcis 365 grid.

2019-09-25: 5. repeats itself. Oh, dumb me, I was in a debugger, hitting a
breakpoint.

2019-09-25: Loading, loading, loading.. reopening tab.

2019-09-25: reading text on community.dynamics.com. Suddenly, text gets
distorted

2019-09-27: Viewing [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/3142345/microsoft-d...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/3142345/microsoft-dynamics-365-onpremise-cumulative-updates) and
opening article numbers. To go back, must press back button 3 times (history
gets filled). Only 1 in chrome.

2019-10-01: Callstack in a huge javascript file? Firefox just can't cope that.
It just hangs. Must wait very long

2019-10-01: Scrolling javascript file in debugger. Just empty window, no text
rendered. Scrolling here and there or clicking fixes it.

2019-10-01: Javascript debugging frustrating. When I want reload page, I have
continue debugger. Now it feels like firefox hangs and I have to close debug
tools to refresh my page. Maybe patience could help here.

2019-10-03: Firefox slowing down my browser.. yeah, browsing huge file at
[https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Sample-Quick-start-
for-650db...](https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Sample-Quick-start-
for-650dbcaa/sourcecode?fileId=182557&pathId=290186690). But it won't let me
go back, won't let me refresh, i'm a victim and can't go back to my google
results...

2019-10-07: Opening page.. loading... opening other page from same domain
works. Refresh on first page - still loading. Close tab, open new one - works.

2019-10-07: Looks like refresh is just broken. Long running tab is loading.
Loading.. loading... luckily it did load after all, well at least I thought
so, because page kinda rendered. Only that it wasn't working. And then I was
back to the grey "Loading" page. The issue for me here is that I can't force
to reload the URL in URL bar.

2019-10-11: Opening webpage from URL. Great, site doesn't open. F5 doesn't
help. Cannot switch to different tabs. Thank you for closing many windows and
tabs. Closing with X doesn't work. After killing FF with task manager, you
restore your session - excellent. And now no problem opening that page. Doh.

2019-10-13: Searching something via url bar... well google never opens and F5
doesn't help. And pressing ENTER doesn't help. Re-searching on new tab works.

2019-10-13: Some tab that leaks memory should be reloaded. Well waiting after
CTRL+F5 and waiting and waiting... eh, closing and reopening seems to be
faster.

2019-10-14: Cannot copy from from a Dynamics 365 readonly field. Which is
<label>. This actually bugs me often. Can copy on chrome.

2019-10-21: Not googling on new tab page, loading, nothing happens. New tab
works.

2019-10-21: Writing github issue... scrollbar doesn't work. Well actually tab
doesnt respond. Oh i'm probably opening link in new tab that loads, loads,
loads... Well, killing firefox is the only way I can "unstuck". How can I love
FF? :( Looking forward to write these things down for Chrome in November -
maybe it happens to other browsers too? However credit to FF or GitHub - dunno
- my text wasn't lost in GitHub issue input field!

2019-10-21: Search. It just doesn't search on some pages (Dynamics CRM).
Chrome search works better in these cases.

2019-10-21: Cursor invisible when over Firefox. Probably OS issue, happens to
Chrome too.

2019-10-21: Dropdown list doesn't work as intended. Typing chars doesn't
search (jump to) matched item.

------
firebird84
New version gives SSL_ERROR_UNKNOWN_CA_ALERT on my client certs. Guess I have
to go back to Chrome now...

~~~
edoceo
Just import your CA

~~~
firebird84
It's already installed, that's not it.

~~~
edoceo
Does FF use a different cert-store than os? I've frequently had to fiddle with
os/app cert-stores to get them to trust. Not just import the cert but the
signer too, some times on both sides. I'll likely hit this issue when I
upgrade.

~~~
LinuxBender
It does have it's own cert store. You can test your sites with testssl.sh [1]
to see if they validate correctly. It only depends on openssl and bash. If you
have your own self signed CA/certs, then you would have to import them into
FF.

[1] -
[https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh](https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh)

