
Firefox 71: A year-end arrival - antibland
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/firefox-71-a-year-end-arrival/
======
blendergeek
See previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694285)

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icefog
Firefox is on a serious roll this year, from performance improvements to
actual privacy hardening that matters. Since Chrome rolled out auto-login,
I've made it my personal mission to stop using it, and now I'm realizing I
haven't even installed Chrome on my newly imaged laptop. I doubt I'll have any
reason to switch back.

~~~
nashashmi
There are a couple of websites that Firefox doesn't work. Same experience on
mobile.

But Chrome works all the time.

~~~
Enginerrrd
This is absolutely true, though I have still switched to Firefox and no longer
use Chrome. I've taken to filing bug reports or reaching out on the "contact
us" page of websites when I find a feature isn't working correctly on firefox.

~~~
iudqnolq
Sometimes those are FF bugs (or "bugs", but FF wants to fix them anyway), and
you can report them to the firefox-run
[https://webcompat.com](https://webcompat.com) through the menu.

> People expect websites to work regardless of the device or browser they are
> using. When a site works in one browser but not another, that is most likely
> a web compatibility bug that we want to know about.

I reported an inline-svg rendering bug in FF preview. It only took a minute or
two, and a volunteer responding within a day that they had replicated the
problem and moved it to a Github issue, which frankly amazed me.

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save_ferris
> Sometimes you need to find a CSS file that defines a color, or work out
> which file generates a button label on a page. Full-text search makes this
> possible by letting you search through all resources in the Network Monitor.

This is incredible.

~~~
prox
Yeah, love this feature, will be a definite time saver. I like all of the
updates.

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MayeulC
I wonder if they couldn't use Firefox Replay's features to enhance privacy:
"taint" code that has touched identifying or fingerprinting information. If
that code tries to exfiltrate such information, replay that data path with
dummy values.

It would also be interesting to extend this to the OS level (maybe for user
data first, and maybe move on to fingerprinting information later).

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Coxa
> The Network panel has a new Messages tab. You can observe all messages sent
> and received through a WebSocket connection.

This is awesome. Definitely a feature that separated FF from Chrome DevTools

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minikites
>We would however like to highlight Picture-in-picture (PIP). If you start
playing a video on a web page, but then want to check out other content, you
can activate PIP and keep the video playing in a small overlay while you
continue to navigate the rest of the page (or other pages).

That's pretty nice.

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timewarrior
Only reason I haven't moved to Firefox on my Mac is that I can't reassign
keyboard shortcut for tab change (without using any external software).

Firefox default is Cmd-Shift-[], which gives me pain in left hand if I use it
too much. So I have used OS keyboard to reassign the tab change to Cmd-[].
Most apps seem to respect it, but Firefox doesn't.

Does anyone have a better solution?

~~~
weaksauce
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/shortkeys/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/shortkeys/)

allows you to set a keyboard shortcut for it (among other things)

disclaimer: I don't personally use it.

~~~
timewarrior
I don’t install any addons on my browser. Wish Firefox worked just like
others.

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mrandish
I agree that Firefox has been doing great.

The one thing that's really lagging is adding back support for more of the
customizations that were lost in the transition to the new architecture at
FF57.

For example, one of the most useful and popular add-ons ever was called Tab
Mix Plus. Here's a link to the open issues blocking the re-implementation of
this functionality.

[http://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=73159#p73159](http://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=73159#p73159)

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k__
I switched from Chrome back to Firefox some time ago and generally I'm happy
with it.

Just this Firefox Lockwise stuff seems to be buggy. Every once in a while it
disables automatic password fill-in. The security menu is also badly labled,
it states something about asking if login data should be stored, but it's also
resposible to fill it in after it was stored.

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bostik
There is a weird and pretty nasty bug in FF71. When using a built-from-source
version (such as are available in distros), it breaks at least LastPass.

See:
[https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=356405](https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=356405)

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mmmrk
My favorite feature is enabled subpixel positioning of text on Linux. Gives
text a more evenly spaced look.

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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)

~~~
iudqnolq
The Mozilla person who marked this wontfix summed it up pretty well, in my
opinion:

> hi, the distribution folder is a way for third-parties to bundle/modify the
> browser - when a user is paving over a firefox installation with a setup
> file provided by mozilla, the assumption/signal is, that they want to
> receive the plain unmodified version of firefox. that's why the distribution
> folder is getting removed by default. this is the documented behaviour and
> if you want to keep the distribution in place when using an installer from
> mozilla, you'd have to run it with the /RemoveDistributionDir=false
> parameter: [https://firefox-source-
> docs.mozilla.org/browser/installer/wi...](https://firefox-source-
> docs.mozilla.org/browser/installer/windows/installer/FullConfig.html)

> so i assume this bug is a wontfix...

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dvh
When will Firefox support dithering in gradients?

