Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox 62.0 Released

mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 275 posts

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#261

Post by gruez »

zeveb wrote: post #257
gruez wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>why don't they care about the security of their users? Why do they insist on maintaining a backdoor?

did you report this to them? if there was a bug report and they marked it as WONTFIX or something that would give more credence to your theory. otherwise, Hanlon's razor.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#262

Post by jamesgeck0 »

snaky wrote: post #181
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't create a UI that makes everyone happy either. For example, extensions that use the tabs WebExtension API are significantly more varied than the removed Panorama feature.

> You can't create a UI that makes everyone happy either. That's why every software project having a user community has theme support.

Browser themes change appearance, not functionality.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#263

Post by jamesgeck0 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #175
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the trend is one way, and one way only: The paring down of choise and usefuls public features. ...and creating APIs so that extensions can handle the functionality instead.

> ...and creating APIs so that extensions can handle the functionality instead. If they were actually doing that, I'd be first in line for their defense, but they aren't. Additionally, they keep shoving in features that should be extensions.

They're definitely actively working on giving WebExtensions as much power as they can.

There's a number of new APIs in the pipeline[1] with additional experimental prototypes in various stages of progress[2].

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Projects#New_WebExtension_A...

2. https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#264

Post by guilhas »

gruez wrote: post #197
guilhas wrote: post #141

Firefox 55 working great, most extensions supported and containers working

>Firefox 55 working great meanwhile, all the security patches you're missing out on: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... at least use ESR 52, which is only 1 release cycle out of date as of today.

That version does not support containers extension. It has only basic built in support.

Firefox ESR has thousands of open bugs, and possible exploitable flaws. And I don't presume the current tip will be much better. I don't think the fixes you presented make much difference. Also a hacker more probably will attack tip and ESR.

I'll faster go to Palemoon than returning to Firefox in the near future.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#265

Post by dblohm7 »

394549 wrote: post #256
dblohm7 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm saying that it's unsustainable to maintain a hundreds of features for the benefit of different slices of 1% use.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#266

Post by bzbarsky »

SllX wrote: post #162
wongarsu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently have 76 tabs open and last closed Firefox approximately 2 days ago. Firefox sits at about 5GB RAM usage and 3% CPU, which I find very acceptable. In my experience Firefox handles a large amount of tabs very well, while Chrome tends to eat a lot more RAM in the same situation (while doing its best to hide that fact). On the other hand there are some websites that will easily demand a gigabyte of RAM on the…

I've been using Firefox since 1.5, I've accepted memory leaks as a fact of life. For comparison, I currently have two browser windows open and zero tabs. One is this comment box, the other is a GitHub page. Firefox is using a grand total of 3GB RAM, about 700MB of which is for the WebExtensions process so figure about 2.3GB for a grand total of two pages. This is actually an improvement on the way things used to be,…

I'm curious: what does about:memory have to say about the breakdown of that 2.3GB?

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#267

Post by bzbarsky »

StillBored wrote: post #202
snaky wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

mozjs was a pretty old codebase with some design decisions that made sense in the mid-90s but don't make sense now baked into the API.

The API needed to change to support things like a generational garbage collector. The set of needed API changes was quite large.

Now the project had two options: Make the changes incrementally or all at once. The incremental option would mean API changes with each release until all the changes got made. The all at once option would mean you'd need to do a complete rewrite of all the relevant mozjs code and all the relevant Firefox code all landing in a single release. Since the time needed for that rewrite was measured in years, that would mean maintaining a branch and dealing with all the merge conflicts from other ongoing work. In practice, it would have meant a much slower pace of web-facing JS feature development at best; more likely a complete stop to that.

Given those choices, the JS team went for the incremental route. Yes, it was painful for API consumers who needed to be running against current versions. But in this case, I expect it was the right tradeoff.

I should also note that V8 breaks API compat regularly, though not to the extent that SpiderMonkey had to, due to being designed 15 years later with many benefits of hindsight.

[Disclosure: I work on Firefox, closely with the JS team but not on the JS team.]

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#268

Post by psteinweber »

nine_k wrote: post #21

Not related to this particular release, but I wish Mozilla implemented tree-style tabs as core feature (or at least provided core API). The current "Tree style tab" plugin in indispensable for me, but has to be a hack, however exquisite, especially around tab context menus.

Agreed, and I'm confident to say that every power user would benefit from vertical tabs. After all you can still read the title text when having more than 10 tabs open.

I'm experiencing the retina macbook performance issue, hence I can't use FF + tree style tabs anymore, which was frustrating. Until I recently discovered the Vivaldi Browser (https://vivaldi.com/) which has it as a native option - plus it's built on Chromium. Most Chrome extensions work.

Good setup for me so far!

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#269

Post by BuckRogers »

tomc1985 wrote: post #231
BuckRogers wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware that Chrome did that, but I'm generally wary of Google anything and always have been. I'm a longtime Firefox(/DDG) power user, since it was Phoenix. I never left even when Chrome was hot, of course I've done testing on and off over the years but was never impressed with Chrome. I'm one that if just accepting anything, would use a platform's native browser (Edge, in my case) before Chrome, as native bro…

Don't run desktop Chrome on any kind of embedded environment with a metered connection ;) We had to blacklist google in the devices' firewalls to make all the transmissions stop

That's crazy. I've often simplistically categorized the interests of each browser as such.

Edge/Safari- designed for the best interests of the machine.

Chrome- designed to operate in the best interests of Google.

Firefox- designed for the best interests of the user.

I can see an argument for Firefox, and Edge/Safari until we have better battery technology. I can't explain why anyone informed would willingly choose a browser designed to further the interests of a publicly traded, vulture capitalist corporation. Marketing is powerful on mediocre minds.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#270

Post by jplayer01 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #246
jplayer01 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I have around 200 tabs open and FF is using around 2.5GB. Thats with close to a dozen add-ons. Chrome would’ve choked and died long before reaching 100 tabs. Memory-wise, I'm quite happy with FF now. Now they just need to make their session API less garbage.

What OS are you on?

Linux and Win10
Post reply on HN