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Firefox 62.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#201

Post by StillBored »

unethical_ban wrote: post #187
394549 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've read somewhere that Firefox telemetry showed that hardly anyone used the bookmark descriptions. > In that case, understandable they chose to remove them. It's not understandable. That logic leads to dumbed-down, point-and-grunt products because the "telemetry" shows most users aren't power users. Anyway, how much effort does it really take to maintain a text field on a bookmark entity?

>Anyway, how much effort does it really take to maintain a text field on a bookmark entity? My thought too! Legacy extension APIs are one thing. An extra DB column / key:value pair is nothing.

If you think about, how this simplifies anything, you will start to understand the mess that is the FF codebase (not that chrome is noticeably better, particularly if you try and build it anywhere outside of ubuntu/x86_64).

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#202

Post by StillBored »

snaky wrote: post #179
jaas wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

The relevant comment from Bugzilla thread > Nonetheless, I'd argue that it's a matter of PR among the subset of users most likely to champion Firefox. > When the reading list functionality just vanished on me one day and I rushed to make a backup of reading-list.sqlite in case it got deleted later, it did not leave me with a very good impression of Mozilla. (rather than, for example, seeing that it had been migrated…

Add to that rant the fact that for a while mozjs was the choice javascript engine for various projects that wanted a JS interpreter. Then one day they decided to literally break the API, every couple weeks, and its been going on for years. The language bindings aren't even the same now, and projects like gnome end up with these rather large patch sets every few months just to keep up.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#203

Post by Endy »

nikbackm wrote: post #125
nathcd wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I appreciate the explanation and links, and I can definitely appreciate the fact that it's a maintenance burden that's taking away from other important work. But it's still hard to swallow -- given the really, truly amazing engineering work that's been coming out of Mozilla (Rust and Servo are what I'm thinking of), and the gargantuan effort going into those -- that the APIs involved in the bookmarking system…

I've read somewhere that Firefox telemetry showed that hardly anyone used the bookmark descriptions. In that case, understandable they chose to remove them.

No, it's not understandable at all. It might be understandable to have an option to display descriptions or not, but not remove altogether. Frankly, Firefox was, for a long time, the only major privacy-respecting browser. Heck, Tor Browser is still built on FF. By only caring about "telemetry" (i.e. random information sharing without the user having the ability to audit data prior to any transmission), and not caring about providing the best and most robust privacy-focused feature set, Firefox is actively cutting off a major part of its old user base, telling them that Firefox is not the browser which they originally installed anymore. Now, if the description data was being stored in plaintext and that data was being leaked, by all means, say that outright so we know that the devs screwed up again, remove the dangerous function, leave the data to the user (that part really kills me, btw - Mozilla is trying to delete information from my PC without my explicit consent), and put it in roadmap to reimplement in a more privacy-driven way.

That means, do not reveal information to any server - and I mean any - if I have a server on my network, don't let my user settings leak there. Do not rely on an external, insecure, website to do what your browser should. And all websites are insecure - I am not the only person to deal with the server from bare metal up, that means there are twice as many security risks as there are abstractions from me plugging my computer directly into that computer.

If you want "telemetry", give me a button in my options menu to compile the report, in human-readable plaintext, and then, only after I approve it, ask me to send that text file through sFTP to a server I can log into with a one-time username and password, with 1024bit encryption minimum. I would be okay with sending a monthly report, after having confirmed that it does in fact contain no information whatsoever that could be used to deanonymize me. Anything more than once a month per user is extreme, and means that the devs are being overloaded with data so they don't have time to manually code.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#204

Post by StillBored »

snaky wrote: post #142
m-p-3 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they remove tags supports later on, that will be the last useful feature I'm hanging on. The bookmarking system is being downgraded to the point of uselessness, at this point I'd switch back to Chrome.

Bromite [1] is promising, especially if someone begin to build it for desktop platforms. [1] https://www.bromite.org/

What does it have over Falkon (previously, https://qupzilla.com, which supported a whole pile of platforms), or for that matter any of the chromium based browsers, which all seem to be "de-googled"?

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#205

Post by Endy »

coffeefirst wrote: post #30
phakding wrote: post #23

With all these posters complaining, am I the only one who is totally satisfied with Firefox? I never had many issues using firefox. I did use Chrome briefly, but came back to firefox. If it matters, I mostly use firefox on Debian Linux and am also not a web developer.

I keep trying to switch. The thing that stops me is it chokes on big single page apps. Arguably the problem is the sites being choked on (too much javascript) but there's not much I can do about that.

Stop trying to do things in your browser that should be their own independent programs.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#206

Post by derefr »

polkadotted wrote: post #109
bovine3dom wrote: post #56

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…

Thank you for your work. I'm currently a tridactyl user. However I'd like to point out that none of these replacements can currently compete with the previous extensions in term of usability. Simply put, you cannot count on the keyboard shortcuts to work consistently throughout Firefox. They do not work in built-in pages (such as errors). They do not work when inside an input field in GTK. There's no way to consisten…

> They do not work when inside an input field in GTK.

I feel like this is a symptom of a larger issue: if Firefox is a GTK app (in Linux), why is it up to Firefox to decide how to resolve these inputs? Shouldn't it be GTK doing that? Ergo, shouldn't the "vi-ization" be occurring at the GTK level, and so apply to all GTK apps loaded by the user?

> They do not work in built-in pages (such as errors).

That's certainly dumb, though.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#207

Post by Endy »

tomc1985 wrote: post #160
snaky wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating XUL, really? You cannot create an restricted API for everything, the very point of extensions, plugins, addons is community is always bigger than your developers team, and much, much more diverse. The 'long tail' effect is what extensions community is about, not '90 per cent of users'. 90 per cent of users might need just a couple of the same extensions, the other 10 per cent of users need a thousand of diff…

Well, we had XUL (which was awesome), now it's gone

The community still has XUL thanks to Pale Moon.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#208

Post by snaky »

StillBored wrote: post #204
snaky wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bromite [1] is promising, especially if someone begin to build it for desktop platforms. [1] https://www.bromite.org/

What does it have over Falkon (previously, https://qupzilla.com , which supported a whole pile of platforms), or for that matter any of the chromium based browsers, which all seem to be "de-googled"?

Is the Falcon actively developed recently? By the way, Bromite is available in F-Droid, is there any plans about Falcon for Android?

> any of the chromium based browsers, which all seem to be "de-googled"

Are there many of them?

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#209

Post by StillBored »

snaky wrote: post #208
StillBored wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it have over Falkon (previously, https://qupzilla.com , which supported a whole pile of platforms), or for that matter any of the chromium based browsers, which all seem to be "de-googled"?

Is the Falcon actively developed recently? By the way, Bromite is available in F-Droid, is there any plans about Falcon for Android? > any of the chromium based browsers, which all seem to be "de-googled" Are there many of them?

The Falkon fork was just made a few months ago although the latest release is from May, so that is fairly old in browser update land, but being just a few months old is pretty decent WRT browsers that aren't FF/Chrome. OTOH, QupZilla was one of those just a few releases a year projects anyway. So a few months between releases wasn't unusual.

https://github.com/QupZilla/qupzilla/blob/master/CHANGELOG

Looking at the Falkon repo (https://phabricator.kde.org/source/falkon/) there were commits made just a couple days ago. So, it looks like its being actively developed. There is also a fair amount of mailing list chatter.

Yes, there are a ton of chromium forked browsers: (random link with a long list of alternative browsers, almost all of them have some tie to ff or chrome) http://www.canadiancontent.net/tech/downloads/Internet-Brows...

As far as android versions, I don't know what the plans are, you could ask them. AFAIK, Qupzilla didn't support any mobile platforms, although QT does iOS & Android. I'm sure they would take a pull request

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