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Firefox 62.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be it's because I come from a different culture, I am not so entitled. Firefox is free, as in speech and beer. It also doesn't phone home with your private data as a payload. That Is good enough for me to be happy. If something doesn't work for me, I find a workaround or a plug-in and am happy again. If there's something needs to be fixed, I write bug reports. So it might seem to you that no power user could poss…

So in your culture one is supposed to be grateful for free things unquestioningly? Why does culture need to be brought into this? If, one day, churches started handing out rat poison to the hungry instead of food; are the hungry entitled to happily eat that rat poison because it is free? The problem is that Firefox makes these promises and builds a platform (in this case, old-school XUL-powered extensions), builds a…

Sorry, but your analogy doesn't make much sense.

Firefox is fast, modern, feature rich, and, free browser. Your grievance is about missing some feature that you use.

The right analogy would be that the church is providing perfectly nutritious food that majority of the people eat, but a homeless guy is griping about not having wine with the meal. After all the homeless guy is old now and he is used to having wine with meals.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#252

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 stopped using most legacy extensions a while back when I found Firefox was faster and more stable without them. So, this change only affects me for the better - ditching years of crufty "oh we have to do this super-kludgey thing because a couple big extensions rely on it" code so the whole thing can go multi-process and keep improving.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#253
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some mention of improvement for this in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824#c221 -- scheduled to be released in Firefox 63. You might try the nightly and see if it's already fixed.

1. Nightly has some profile incompatible database changes 2. That bug is OS X only. The parent is on Windows 10.

Pro tip: Windows users can try out Nightly (or Beta or ESR or Developer) without impacting their main install with the portable packages from PortableApps.com: https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox-portable-nigh...

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#254
post #171
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I don't like Firefox with each new release, the alternatives are worse. So I've settled for FF until it falls far enough to lose the title of "least worst browser". But I've quit suggesting it to others. They can use Chrome all they want.

> suggesting it to others When majority of power users stop suggesting it to users around them, Firefox has no future anymore.

Ironically enough it might be a good recommendation for everyone else even if it annoys us.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#255
post #240
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It basically means: worth tailoring to, given precious UI space and limited developer resources. How much precious developer time is required maintain a user-facing text field on an entity with only a handful of other fields? Certainly not enough to properly justify a feature regression with user-data loss. > Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%? IMHO, you're thinking about power…

> How much precious developer time is required maintain a user-facing text field on an entity with only a handful of other fields? The description removal blocked improvements to bookmarking that will actually affect a significant share of users: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?maxdepth...

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#256
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It basically means: worth tailoring to, given precious UI space and limited developer resources. How much precious developer time is required maintain a user-facing text field on an entity with only a handful of other fields? Certainly not enough to properly justify a feature regression with user-data loss. > Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%? IMHO, you're thinking about power…

How is that supposed to be sustainable?

Are you saying it's unsustainable to maintain an application suitable for power users?

It'll definitely take more effort than maintaining a restrictive, dumbed-down app; but it's certainly not impossible and I think the benefit is worth it.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#257
post #196
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which account, as I've documented before, is insecure; you should not have a Firefox account and should not store passwords, browsing history, bookmarks or any other privacy- or security-related data with Mozilla's system. (short version: Mozilla can target you with a small piece of JavaScript to steal your password, then use it offline to decrypt your data)

source/explanation?

Firefox Accounts encrypt user data with (a function of) a master key; that master key is encrypted with a key derived from the user's Firefox Account password. It would be completely insecure for Mozilla to know the user's password (because then they would be able to use the password to decrypt the master key & the master key to decrypt each private datum), so they have set up a protocol in which the user enters his password in his browser, and the browser performs some one-way operations on the password to authenticate. Sounds secure, right?

The problem is that this happens in JavaScript which is downloaded from Mozilla's site. It would be trivial for Mozilla to target a single user with a piece of JavaScript which boils down to:

   if (username === 'target') { sendPlaintextPassword(); }
The solution is for user login to be impossible through web pages, and only available via the browser UI. This would mean third parties would have the opportunity to audit the Firefox source code (e.g. Debian, Red Hat and other distros could check to see if the source they build is malicious). It would also mean that silently targetting a single user would be far less possible (they could still try to send that user a malicious browser if he automatically installs updates — but a security-conscious user gets his updates from a distro, not from Mozilla directly).

It's a really nasty flaw, and the fact that they refuse to address it worries me: why don't they care about the security of their users? Why do they insist on maintaining a backdoor?

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse is the unreliable working of vi-keys. Often enough focus ends somewhere on the page, and the vi-extension just stops working. I've yet to find a reliable way to gain input-focus again in those cases.

Sometimes this is our fault - there's a bug with our command line where it doesn't close properly and can steal focus (particularly `tabopen about:addons`). I am sorry about that. We're working on tearing it out and starting again as the command line has lots of problems. Otherwise, it's usually YouTube. I just only interact with the videos using the mouse (or MPV via `;v`) and make sure to click outside them afterwa…

I don't think it's just that bug. I have a userstyle to mark the displayed element, so I sometimes see when something is grabing the focus, and neither tab nor ESC or Alt-l helps in those cases. But after some reseach I found out F6 can help there. Till now I thought it's just the same as Alt-l and only focus the addressbar, but turns out it can also unfocus it and switch focus between the different areas of firefox. I tested it in the last hour and it really worked in several cases where I was stuck in focus-hell.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be an example of a "big single page app"?

Google Calendar crushes FF for me. I can't leave it open very long or it slows down FF, eats CPU cycles, and drains my battery.

That's on purpose. It is apparently Google's policy that every Google website must be accessed with a Google browser, or else. Be thankful it works at all unlike, say, Google Hangouts.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#260
post #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 wond…

I think it really went downhill earlier than that; somewhere around 4 was when they stopped trying to work with the ecosystem and just started blocking things instead. Perhaps I've accidentally got rose-tinted glasses on though…
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