
Firefox 67.0 Released - Spydar007
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/67.0/releasenotes/
======
zimbatm
Firefox 67 also the first browser that ships with `prefers-color-scheme` (aka
dark mode) after Safari.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme)

And it does the right thing and disables the feature when enabling the resist
fingerprinting option.

I did a small survey and only very few websites have developed a second dark
theme: [https://zimbatm.com/DarkMode](https://zimbatm.com/DarkMode)

~~~
megous
BTW, cheap-ass dark mode can be made by:

    
    
      filter: invert(95%) hue-rotate(190deg)
    

on <body> and perhaps fiddling with some backgrounds, to avoid transparency.

~~~
escapecharacter
I'm curious, why 190deg and not 180deg ?

~~~
diggan
Stylistic choice? Didn't find any information why exactly 190deg, so assuming
the author just liked it that way.

Made a quick demo showing the difference:
[https://output.jsbin.com/hujebimavu/1](https://output.jsbin.com/hujebimavu/1)

I don't really see any difference between 180 and 190 though.

~~~
c0vfefe
Thanks for the demo. I barely see a difference too.

------
arusahni
Congrats to Mozilla on shipping WebRender[1]! Just Nvidia on Windows for now,
but I'm looking forward to the restrictions being relaxed - the perf
improvements have been significant on my end.

1: [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/)

~~~
hiccuphippo
You can enable it manually with the following:

> To turn on WebRender, go to about:config, enable the gfx.webrender.all pref,
> and restart the browser.

~~~
vbuwivbiu
if you enable it & restart on another platform will it work ? how would you
confirm it's working ?

~~~
callahad
It should. To confirm it's working, visit about:support and look for
"WebRender" in the "Compositing" field.

------
bscphil
Firefox 67 should be the first version to fix permissions request spam: where
tons of websites request your location (common enough that it's become a meme)
or for permission to send you notifications.

Before Firefox 67, if you choose to hide these notifications by default,
there's no way to change this later for individual sites without (a) knowing
the site needs this information, and (b) going to Firefox's preferences menu
to add an exception.

Now, a small icon will appear next to the lock icon when Firefox automatically
denies a permissions request. You can click that icon and grant the request.
This means that permissions are now easily configurable without those spammy
popups appearing on so many websites!

I liked this feature so much I actually backported it to Firefox 66, and I can
say it's an amazing quality improvement.

~~~
tomcatfish
I'd like a way to manually enable a plug-in for a specific site. I have sites
that won't request flash that require it, and it's a pain to turn flash to
allow all to view the site and then turn it back off.

If this setting exists and I'm missing it, someone please tell me.

~~~
bscphil
Can't you right click on the site, click "View Page Info", go to permissions,
and give the site the permission to run Adobe Flash?

I'm assuming this setting still works, but I kind of doubt there are too many
people who install and test it these days. I don't think I've encountered a
site that requires flash in years.

------
akavel
_> "Enable FIDO U2F API, and permit registrations for Google Accounts"_

Oh! Didn't expect that! Does this mean YubiKeys will now be working in GMail
on Firefox?

Together with all the other stuff, this starts to look like a really important
and major release of Firefox.

~~~
lholden
Yep, though technically one could enable this before now by tweaking the
about:config security.webauth.u2f setting. (Which is something I've been
having to do for a while now).

As a side note... the way Google handles U2F is somewhat out of spec. For
example, you haven't been able to _register_ a u2f device with Firefox on
google. I wonder if that's been worked around with this release? That would be
great!

Otherwise, u2f has worked perfect with sites like GitLab and GitHub for
example.

~~~
phillc73
> about:config security.webauth.u2f

I still have this set to Value: "false" in Firefox 66.0.5 and it's working
fine for Google Accounts.

Edit: I'm pretty sure I registered by Nitrokeys with Google back in 2017 using
Chrome, so I'm just referring to signing in with them.

~~~
judge2020
You could always sign in with any key, you just could only register keys via
Chrome.

~~~
phillc73
I seem to recall U2F sign-in always failing with Firefox for a long time. I
remember having to switch to Chrome for U2F and frankly ended up using a
different 2FA method for a couple of years because of that.

------
stevekemp
When I upgraded from 66.0.5 it created a new profile, rather than keeping my
existing passwords/histories/extensions.

I'm not going to use firefox sync, so it seems like there will be a painful
migration ahead.

~~~
callahad
We're defaulting to profile-per-install to make it easier to run different
versions side-by-side, but you can still manually specify your original
profile.

Docs on the profile manager are at [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/profile-manager-create-...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles)

...or, as a super weird hack, you can set the envvar SNAP_NAME=firefox to get
the old behavior (see [https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-
mozilla/issues/163](https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla/issues/163) for
context)

~~~
groovybits
Just curious, how large is the benefit of this? Does the average user run
multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side?

I consider myself a power user in many things, but never have I felt the need
to run different versions of my browser simultaneously.

~~~
callahad
There are two sides to that coin:

1\. People do genuinely seem to find it useful (it's been a feature in
Developer Edition for years), so that's cool, but also...

2\. Sharing a profile between different versions of Firefox can cause data
loss, and profile-per-install makes it harder to accidentally make that
mistake.

So it's win-win. As for why people find it useful, I've mainly seen two camps:

\- People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate.

\- Developers who want to maintain a pristine / default browser environment
for testing, and a customized one for development.

I've also, on occasion, seen normal people with separate browsers for specific
tasks (only using Facebook in Opera, only banking in Firefox, etc.) Now those
can all be different foxen! :-)

~~~
groovybits
I see the use case for developers who want to test multiple versions.

But as stevekemp said, the average user is losing their profile when simply
upgrading from one version to the next. And it seems that the fix to this is
to go back into the Profile Manager and set you old profile as the new
default. Wouldn't this inadvertently cause data loss for the average user?
(Ex: My parents do not even know Profile Manager is, much less that Profiles
exist)

If anything, I see this as a bad thing - especially for those who do not use
FF Sync. Am I interpreting this correctly? We're talking about regular FF
here, not Developer Edition, correct?

Edit:

> People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate.

I thought that's what Multi-Account Containers was supposed to help with.

~~~
callahad
> _Am I interpreting this correctly?_

Not quite. In the normal case, users will _never_ see any difference as a
result of this change. Most users will experience it, semantically, as
"profile per channel," separating normal Firefox from Firefox Nightly, etc.
And if you only use stable Firefox, you only have one profile.

That means that upgrading from Firefox _n_ to Firefox _n+1_ is totally fine
and it will continue to use the same profile. But installing Beta or Nightly
will now default to using a separate profile, instead of trying to use the
same local data as normal Firefox.

I suspect Steve's issue is because he's unpacking his new version of Firefox
to a different location on disk, so we're treating it like a separate install,
rather than an upgrade of an already installed Firefox.

~~~
groovybits
Ah I see now. When you said

> Sharing a profile between different versions of Firefox [...]

I was thinking different version numbers of the same Firefox installation
(stable channel).

Profile-per-channel makes it much more clear, and makes sense.

------
backpackway
> Save passwords in private browsing mode

While this might be handy when visiting your favorite paid porn site, isn't
this counter-intuitive? When I am in private mode, I expect nothing to be
saved.

~~~
pavon
In addition to using private mode for visiting sites that I don't want saved
in my history, I also use it as a poor mans sandbox for visiting sensitive
sites (like my bank), to avoid potential cross-site-scripting attacks while
visiting those sites. For this use-case, saving passwords is very useful. In
fact, my biggest complaint with private mode in Firefox is that my preferred
password manager plugin (bitwarden) doesn't work in private mode.

~~~
vmarsy
Why not use Firefox multi account containers[1] for this use case? Having one
banking container or even one per bank would have the same effect, without the
annoyances of private mode?

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-
containers/)

~~~
pavon
I tried it out, but it was much more structured than I'd like. I don't really
want to have pre-defined a bunch of containers for each site that I want
compartmentalized. I really like the ephemeral nature of private browsing
where a single click gives me a fresh new container that I can use for
whatever I want. Plus, when giving recommendations to family members, private
browsing is more user-facing feature, and easier for them to use.

~~~
CaptainMarvel
As an alternative, there is the “containers on the go” add-on, which will let
you easily (optionally) open new tabs in ephemeral containers.

------
cesarb
> Change to extensions in Private Windows: Any new extensions you add to the
> browser won’t work in Private Windows unless you allow this in the settings.

Does this mean that adblocking (and other safety-related) extensions will
suddenly stop working on private windows, unless the user knows it has to go
to the settings and enable them again?

~~~
jobigoud
I'm interested in the rationale behind this default. What about extensions
make them a possibly bad fit for incognito mode?

~~~
DCoder
The fact that they can still hoover up your browsing data the same way as in
normal mode.

Google Chrome has defaulted to disabling extensions in incognito mode as long
as I can remember:

> Allow in incognito [ ]

> _Warning: Google Chrome cannot prevent extensions from recording your
> browsing history. To disable this extension in incognito mode, unselect this
> option._

------
vanderZwan
That means that one of the most obscure performance regression bugs I've ever
found in Firefox is also fixed: property lookups on numbers being slower for
values recognized and optimized as integers by the JavaScript engine than for
regular doubles.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1523633](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1523633)

------
darkpuma
> _" Suspending unused tabs"_

I'm curious to see how aggressive this is. If it's good enough to render my
tab suspender extension obsolete, that'd be fantastic.

~~~
chupasaurus
> I'm curious to see how aggressive this is.

It's in the config parameter's name: browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory. Boolean,
works only on Windows for now.

~~~
skykooler
Ah man. Hope this makes it to Linux and especially OSX soon!

~~~
j605
On Linux, I use cgroups to restrict memory usage of certain applications to
prevent them from crashing the whole system.

------
ncmncm
Running Firefox under Qubes has become increasingly frustrating, as tabs crash
whenever (apparently?) they try to use WebGL, or anything that depends on
access to a GPU. More and more, Firefox seems to depend on GPU access (or
something?) and fails hard when it's not there.

~~~
testvox
Yeah I had to disable gpu acceleration on Firefox in parallels. Otherwise it
rendered black boxes for elements with certain styles.

~~~
driverdan
That sounds like a Parallels / driver problem, not a Firefox problem.

------
markdog12
> We have seen great growth in the use of AV1 even in just a few months, with
> our latest figures showing that 11.8% of video playback in Firefox

Where are people playing AV1 videos?

YouTube released an AV1 playlist long ago, and haven't added a single video
since release:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyqf6gJt7KuHBmeVzZteZ...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyqf6gJt7KuHBmeVzZteZUlNUQAVLwrZS)

Besides that, I've only seen a few in the wild.

~~~
eclipseo76
Youtube has more AV1 videos than that playlist. My fav Youtuber has AV1 videos
in 720p and it's not a huge channel.

~~~
clarry
How do I tell if a given video playing in my browser is AV1 or something else?

~~~
TD-Linux
Right click the video and choose Stats for Nerds. If Codecs shows something
starting with "av01", it's AV1 (confusingly, av1c is H.264). It seems to be
chosen for nearly every video for 480p or below, and a few for higher
resolutions.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Do you still need to opt in on YouTube for this?

------
radcon
I can't find much info on the fingerprint protection. Has anyone tested it
thoroughly? Do we know if it's effective against current fingerprinting
methods? Can we actually rely on it, or will it simply be a matter of
days/weeks before websites adapt to defeat this protection?

~~~
danShumway
I don't think it's sufficient yet to stop someone determined, but I do think
it's a step in the right direction, particularly when combined with a VPN. I'm
looking forward to the letterboxing improvements.

Anecdotally, I get a _lot_ more captcha's when it's turned on. I regularly log
in to sites and get prompts telling me I need to enter email confirmation
codes. I signed up for a service recently that auto locked my account
immediately on signup because of "abuse detection".

To be clear, I take those as positive signs. My rough metric is that if
privacy invasive sites are mad at me, I'm probably doing something right. So
that's certainly not hard proof that it's effective, but it's at least
circumstantial evidence that websites that I _know_ fingerprint me get
irritated when I turn it on.

~~~
radcon
I agree, those are good signs.

If these fingerprint protection tools are effective, my main fear is that
websites will simply say "Disable your fingerprint protection if you want to
proceed", much like many sites currently do with ad blockers. Or if they don't
spell it out in plain English, they'll make you jump through so many hoops
that you'll switch it off just to end the suffering.

Trying to interact with any major website using the TOR browser has been a
complete nightmare. If you aren't blocked outright, you face CAPTCHAs at every
turn.

~~~
user17843
The fingerprint protection this new setting refers to is simply a blacklist of
a couple of known JS fingerprinters. Those are not relevant for the majority
of users, because fingerprinting with these kind of scripts is only used by a
very small number of obscure sites.

------
whyagaindavid
if anyone from mozilla is reading hn, the link on the pop-up box 'Get the
Lockbox app' go to 'apple appstore' even if I click on the Google Play icon.

~~~
callahad
Thanks for the heads up! We'll get that fixed.

------
nklops
Still no improvement on macOS. Don't know why don't they make it a priority as
I have to use Chrome (Safari is missing some stuff that I need).

~~~
windsignaling
Ha, it's becoming my routine now whenever Firefox is announced on HN to search
for "mac" in the comments. Waiting for that day when someone finally says
something different.

I really want to stop using Chrome, but unfortunately Firefox just doesn't
work as well.

~~~
redsparrow
I'm the same but using Vivaldi while I wait...

------
kpremote
Apologize if this is not the right place to ask for help.

Two days ago when I began to develop a web site backend, a strange thing
happened. Visiting "mydomainname.com" in Firefox v66 gave me back error
message saying site not found, but visiting "mydomainname.com/index.html" (or
index.php) would be fine, the content of that page was returned.

After one hour struggle, I used another browser (and my phone) to open
"mydomainname.com", and it worked fine! It returned the index.html page. So
it's not the issue of the default file setup.

Did I miss something obvious? I felt stupid. I am now using Chrome but I would
like to come back to Firefox. Thanks for any help.

~~~
cpeterso
Does the error happen in a Private Browsing window? Maybe Firefox cached some
"site not found" result it shouldn't have? This sounds more like a server
configuration issue than a Firefox bug.

~~~
kpremote
__Edit: I installed the lastest Firefox v67, the problem is gone. It works
great.__

Thanks. no it's not in a private browsing window.

I also asked other people to visit the site(mydomainname.com) from their
computers and phones, all worked fine.

The hour long struggle left me with painful memories. :) I never had issue
like this previously in Firefox or other browsers. On that day, Chrome and IE
worked without problem on _my computer_ (Win 7 32bit), so the computer should
not be the culprit.

That leaves Firefox v66 standing. I don't know why.

------
OrgNet
> Users will no longer be able to upload and share screenshots through the
> Firefox Screenshots server.

I kinda liked that feature, hopefully they replace it with another cloud
provider for when you need to take a screenshot for sharing

------
jwang2019
Firefox 67.0 does run faster and consume less RAM compared to previous
versions.

------
pcunite
Under about:preferences#general, I can't disable checking for updates? Is
there a way to do this under about:config?

~~~
svnpenn
Its a known issue (for 13 years)

[https://superuser.com/questions/1432983/-/1432993](https://superuser.com/questions/1432983/-/1432993)

~~~
pcunite
This feature has changed from the last version I was using (62.02). The option
"Never check for updates" is now missing.

~~~
svnpenn
Regardless, its currently not possible via the GUI as youve discovered. Im not
happy about the situation but it is being actively worked on as of today.

------
gerbilly
I tried to see if letterboxing was enabled, but it didn't seem to make a
difference.¹

Does anyone know whether they included this feature, and if so how to enable
it?

1: [https://browserleaks.com/javascript](https://browserleaks.com/javascript)
still detects my window size down to the pixel.

~~~
mbrubeck
Set the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" pref to "true"

~~~
gerbilly
I had that setting set to true since before the update.

Every site that mentions letterboxing claims this is the setting to use to
enable it.

However, unless I misunderstand, it does not seem to enable it.

------
hd4
>WebRender is gradually enabled by default on Windows 10 desktops with NVIDIA
graphics cards

Does this mean Webrender in Stable can now be force-enabled for non-Nvidia
graphics cards on Windows 10? The language is a little unclear. AFAIK
Webrender is available to anyone using Nightly by force enabling it.

~~~
ncmncm
It would be better if they offered a way to really turn it off. Firefox has
got very crashy in environments that have no access to a GPU.

~~~
jamienicol
gfx.webrender.force-disabled=true should do the trick.

Though we shouldn't be attempting to switch it on without a GPU, if you could
file a bug that would be great.

~~~
ncmncm
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

------
ianopolous
It would be super awesome if Firefox can implement writable streams:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474543](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474543)

------
jeremiahlee
Have you ever wanted to reset a HTML element’s style, as if it no styling had
been applied? That’s what the `revert` CSS keyword does and you can now use it
in Firefox 67. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/revert](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/revert)

------
Ayesh
I use Firefox's password manager, and their new LockWise extension gives a
fresh breath to password management. Nice work!

------
darkhorn
[https://webauthn.io](https://webauthn.io) Fingerprint reader works with
Microsoft Edge but it doesn't work with Firefox.

------
Aaargh20318
Does this release include javascript MDS mitigations ?

~~~
mccr8
Yes, though they were only necessary on OS X.

------
sridca
Is there a reason why I should switch to Firefox if I already trust Google to
act in good faith?

~~~
roryokane
Only Firefox supports extensions that provide an alternative interface to the
tab bar. Alternative interfaces such as vertical tabs or tree tabs are very
useful if you have many tabs open in a single window. Examples of these
extensions:

• Tab Center Reborn – [https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tabcenter-
reborn...](https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tabcenter-reborn/)

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

• Tree Tabs – [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
tabs/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/)

------
skykooler
> New streamlined worker debugging in the JavaScript Debugger with the new
> Threads panel.

This is great news!

------
m463
Does anyone know how to turn off "Extract Canvas Data" by default?

------
mtgx
It includes the Facebook container, but not the Google container?

~~~
sp332
Where is that mentioned?

------
qxcbr
>Suspending unused tabs

Didn't they already do that? I remember receiving a spinner whenever I changed
between tabs very often since they introduced that multi-process thing.

>More power to you with every update

*Except when we decide to remotely execute code on your computer using Studies/Normandy/whatever

~~~
johnchristopher
> Didn't they already do that? I remember receiving a spinner whenever I
> changed between tabs very often since they introduced that multi-process
> thing.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-
ons/Web...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs/discard)

It seems to be something different than discarded tabs.

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

------
jdlyga
I've tried to switch to Firefox, but I keep running into rendering engine
issues with certain sites. It's like it's 2005 again.

~~~
acdha
Which sites? They actively pursue compatibility issues but it's pretty rare to
see non-Google sites which only work in Chrome.

~~~
Silhouette
_it 's pretty rare to see non-Google sites which only work in Chrome._

Unfortunately that hasn't been my experience in recent months. A noticeable
number of random sites I come across, sometimes including quite important
ones, Just Don't Work in Firefox.

Is there a quick way to send a link to such sites/pages, if someone at Mozilla
is interested in investigating why?

I think it's important to note that this behaviour isn't necessarily due to
anything wrong with Firefox. It could simply be because Firefox is better at
blocking unwanted content than certain other browsers and that feature is
working as intended, but the kinds of sites that rely on hostile content also
tend to break if those scripts are forcibly blocked by the browser.

~~~
moosingin3space
webcompat.com

