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Firefox 62.0 Released

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71–80 of 275 posts

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#71
post #38

> Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html or json files, as they will be removed in a future release. Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features. I don't think these are the feat…

Came here with exact same quote in clipboard, ready to grumble. Not that this is in any way an essential feature to me, but the trend is one way, and one way only: The paring down of choice and useful public features. Firefox of ten years ago was UI-wise a far superior product to the sorry quasi-Chrome of today. I no longer use it with any kind of joy or excitement because it's somehow best. I use it because everything else is even worse. No, please, spare me the recommendation: I do not use Google products. Period.

[Edit: typos]

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#73
post #38

> Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html or json files, as they will be removed in a future release. Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features. I don't think these are the feat…

That's really bad. Deleting user data is one of the most loud ways to declare that "we're bad at software development!" I guess I should consider trying Ungoogled Chromium or maybe Pale Moon. I worry the former will be a menace to build because I don't have lots of RAM and CPU. Edit: I don't use the feature but still...

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Here is what "recommended by pocket", which automatically appeared recently, shows for me [edit: this is non-personalized as mentioned in a comment]: "buzzfeednews: Teachers are moonlighting as instagram influencers to make ends meet" trending "vox: a history of happiness explains why capitalism makes us feel empty inside" trending "theguardian: chanel shoes, but no salary: how one woman exposed the sca…

I have disabled all the Pocket stuff on my Firefox so I didn't see this, but it does not surprise me (even though it disappoints me) that the Mozilla Corporation is using the Firefox home page to push left-wing news.

What a progressive company from Mountain View, CA, would be sticking to? I believe it's sort of hard to be right-wing in a place like that, at least publicly.

I also suppose that this may be the default for a particular audience / geolocation. That is, maybe they'd show a different thing in Russia (sorry, I don't have a Russian VPN), and maybe even a different thing in Texas. Or maybe something based on your previous browsing history (e.g. if you read something like zerohedge a lot, they might show you a different, more aligned site).

I don't know, and am not inclined to thoroughly experiment. But the complete source is there, and it must be a relatively recent addition, so anybody interested could just dive in and find out. Yay Mozilla!

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#75
post #13

I'm a die-hard Firefox fan. While all my colleagues develop in Chrome, I'm the weird one who uses Firefox and always catches some problem in rendering when testing. But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use case.

I'm also using Windows 10, 4K monitor, Firefox and GTX 1060 and have no issues. So your issue might not actually be related to resolution.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#76

Coinciding with this release, Firefox 52 ESR is no longer supported, so no supported versions of Firefox support the legacy extensions. I'm mentioning this here just so I can tell Vimperator / Pentadactyl / VimFx users that there are loads of options you can replace your old extensions with, some of which are... okay. Links follow in increasing order of user-friendliness: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl [^] ht…

Have you considered Pale Moon? Do you thing it's usable/dependable?

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#77
post #38

> Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html or json files, as they will be removed in a future release. Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features. I don't think these are the feat…

The Firefox bookmarking implementation is unnecessarily complicated and I'm guessing very few features are actually used. It's a maintenance burden, I'm not surprised they want to slim it down.

To give you an example of a maintenance burden in the bookmarking system, the bookmarking system uses a bunch of synchronous APIs. Mozilla is trying to cut down or eliminate use of those APIs, to reduce UI hangs among other reasons, and in order to do that a bunch of bookmarking code needs to be rewritten.

You may have decided that you don't care about this particular kind of bloat, but all unnecessary maintenance burdens distract developers from doing work I'm sure you do care about.

Here is the bug for removing descriptions:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890

Here is a sub-bug that discusses issues with synchronous APIs.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1467996

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#78
post #7

> Added Canadian English (en-CA) locale Not bad, Eh?!

Some thorough translator finished translating all the strings for a project of mine into en-CA, which triggered the build error for having two exactly identical files in the tree (since en-CA was entirely identical to en-US). Nothing is free! This is why we can't have useless things!

Some words are different though, for example armor vs armour. Although that should be similar to en-gb.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#79
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Here is what "recommended by pocket", which automatically appeared recently, shows for me [edit: this is non-personalized as mentioned in a comment]: "buzzfeednews: Teachers are moonlighting as instagram influencers to make ends meet" trending "vox: a history of happiness explains why capitalism makes us feel empty inside" trending "theguardian: chanel shoes, but no salary: how one woman exposed the sca…

"Recommended by Pocket" is not "Highlights". Yes, I do disable the "recommended" stuff. When I enable "Highlights" on the new tab page, I see pages I spent a lot of time on lately: e.g. OpenWRT recommended hardware page, Coney Island water temperature page, and a page about the Graphwiz format. None of them are related to anything in Pocket (which I also actively use), or, thank goodness, buzzfeed.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#80
With each new Firefox release, it gets farther and farther away from what the browser once was. I started using Firefox over a decade ago, now it's become just a different version of awful. I don't know exactly happened when Mozilla lost their perspective, but I do know when - the first introduction of Australis. And they should have figured out, when you name it after something upside-down, you should seriously wonder if it's upside down. WebExtensions is just piling error upon error.

And with each new release, more control is taken from the user, more decent features are removed. I swear, Firefox peaked at 4.0.

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