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Firefox 64 Released

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Re: Firefox 64 Released

#341

Post by skeoh »

lugg wrote: post #303
preommr wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implying there's some intrinsic reason browsers can't have customizeable scrollbars.

It's called usability through famiarity. Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern. Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should. > When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become famili…

Just curious: does this principal apply only to scrollbars or should sites not be able to change the appearance of other controls -- like buttons, for example?

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#343

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #209
mancerayder wrote: post #180

What's the status of the cat and mouse game being played with autoplay video being forced on and new options needing to be hunted down? First Chrome forced it on, because EvilCorp's business model is around a forced-open-eyelid philosophy of advertising revenue from unstoppable impressions. Next I moved to Firefox, which in an update a few months ago changed the autoplay option to be on, removed the config attribute…

Mozilla get all their money from Google, don't they? Seems like that's probably the only reasonable "reason"? Presumably they publish meeting minutes where such decisions are made?

Not sure how you can disagree with a question, but I looked it up:

>"Back in 2014, the last year of the Google deal, that agreement brought in $323 million of the foundation’s $330 million in total revenue."

They had deal with Yahoo for similar money, and walked from that to go to Google again.

For financials I can find they got all but 2% of their money from Google.

Presumably for this money Google gets to call some shots like no default blocking off their ads, and, I'd imagine autoplay as default if that's important to Google.

I'd expect a supposedly open foundation like Mozilla to publish details of major decisions. You're not open without transparency.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#345

Post by trulyrandom »

pmoriarty wrote: post #335
trulyrandom wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, if you already have malware running on your system, all bets are off. However, I'm sure you're aware that large applications like Chromium have tons of vulnerabilities, which is why they come with a sandbox to protect against exploitation. X11 is one of the biggest holes in these sandbox solutions. Replacing X11 with Wayland would plug this hole. I'd argue that security is something the average user cares abou…

If your web browser is compromised, that's malware running on your system right there. A compromised web browser doesn't need X to control the rest of your system. It can usually already write all over your system and perform all sorts of other attacks, including substituting applications, paths, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.. not to mention try kernel exploits and the like -- not that they'd need to on a single-user system,…

> It can usually already write all over your system and perform all sorts of other attacks

Not necessarily. Properly sandboxed applications like Chromium have a seccomp filter, separate pid/user/etc namespaces and bind mounts setup to isolate themselves from the rest of the system as much as possible.

> Anyway, if a typical user's browser is compromised, they're already completely screwed

It really depends on which part of the browser is compromised. Again, Chromium has some pretty good isolation. Having one malicious website exploit a vulnerability does not necessarily mean the attacker gets access to any of the other browser data.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#346

Post by exodust »

daleharvey wrote: post #219
mancerayder wrote: post #180

What's the status of the cat and mouse game being played with autoplay video being forced on and new options needing to be hunted down? First Chrome forced it on, because EvilCorp's business model is around a forced-open-eyelid philosophy of advertising revenue from unstoppable impressions. Next I moved to Firefox, which in an update a few months ago changed the autoplay option to be on, removed the config attribute…

I introduced the change to 0,1,2. Not sure what happened when we first introduced autoplay but the change to 0,1,2 was so we could let users switch between enabled, disabled and ask the user. Original plan was to ask the user by default. We did some user testing with this change and it looks like we will be changing it to block by default based on feedback Not sure what this has to do with any companies ad revenue, o…

I'm confused about what this means when for example I want the video to play via javascript external to the embedded player.

For example, when user clicks text link on page that opens a lightbox (such as fancybox) containing an embedded video. I (and the user) would want the video to begin playing immediately upon opening the lightbox. But it sounds ilke the user will now need to additionally press play on the embedded video? Anyone know?

I really hope this is not the case. I'm hoping the clicking of the initial text link that opens lightbox is enough to authorize video playback with sound on all devices.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#347

Post by mancerayder »

drbawb wrote: post #265
daleharvey wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I introduced the change to 0,1,2. Not sure what happened when we first introduced autoplay but the change to 0,1,2 was so we could let users switch between enabled, disabled and ask the user. Original plan was to ask the user by default. We did some user testing with this change and it looks like we will be changing it to block by default based on feedback Not sure what this has to do with any companies ad revenue, o…

Block by default, and not ask by default? That seems unfortunate to me, and will definitely break one of my services for Firefox users. I have a site which coordinates watching videos amongst a party of people. To the browser heuristics it looks like "autoplay" (the host starts the video manually, and some scripting on the page kicks it off for everyone else and works w/ the backend to maintain something resembling s…

>Block by default, and not ask by default? That seems unfortunate to me, and will definitely break one of my services for Firefox users.

Hold on -- do you want a popup every time you visit a new page? It's a nightmare. And break what for whom? You want something to play, you click the Play icon on the video. It doesn't BLOCK video by default, it blocks the autoplaying of the same.

Also - and perhaps this was some bug or some setting I had - but when I updated to 'that' Firefox some months back, I'm pretty sure I had autoplay playING things. I had previously used about:config to have autoplay off, and then they changed it (as per the 0 1 2 and property name change). Possibly I hit enter too fast, possibly I didn't notice and just got annoyed at the popups asking me, whatever it was, I wanted it just "off" and I had to Google around until I found comment in some forum someplace which has this option. The point is, instead of being an "about:config" option, it should be an obvious setting in the Menu -> Options section.

I'm amazed that someone thinks not forcing things is somehow "breaking" things. If it's the type of breaking you mean (breaking ad-tech), then yes, let's continue the smashathon. Autoplay video, whether on a news site or some yapping garbage on the side as an ad, is a terrible trend for us who don't like such distractions.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#348

Post by [deleted] »

kevincrane wrote: post #120

> We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window. Yessss. It doesn't happen often, but the times when I open up 6-10 tabs for research but then decide…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#349

Post by PavlovsCat »

JohnFen wrote: post #321
PavlovsCat wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean, as well? That's the only bit you didn't ignore.. and it's useful for when you draw your own cursor in WebGL. I can't think of a single time I ever saw it abused, I guess I don't frequent the kind of website that would.

By "as well", I mean "as well as objecting to web devs being able to alter the appearance of browser controls". Yes, I do see the usefulness of being able to do all of those things, but in practice, I don't appreciate it when it's done. I'm not saying that it's abusive (and I'm not talking about egregious misuse of these abilities), I'm just saying that I personally dislike it when sites do this sort of thing. I fear…

> I do see the usefulness of being able to do all of those things, but in practice, I don't appreciate it when it's done.

That I can certainly agree with. I also think users should be able to override and customize things... ideally, everybody gets more options? And user agents should absolutely be user agents, instead of brochure displays.

While design may be somewhat subjective, I also think websites are getting worse. If that's a "personal issue", we both have it :D Just the last one I just looked at, that made me think "why? who is this for?"

https://www.opensuse.org/

vs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081210082207/http://www.opensu...

I just think marketing (and mobile?) play a much larger role in the downfall of the web and the rise of generic copy drowning in padding, than all the stuff we can do with CSS.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#350

Post by drbawb »

daleharvey wrote: post #279
drbawb wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Block by default, and not ask by default? That seems unfortunate to me, and will definitely break one of my services for Firefox users. I have a site which coordinates watching videos amongst a party of people. To the browser heuristics it looks like "autoplay" (the host starts the video manually, and some scripting on the page kicks it off for everyone else and works w/ the backend to maintain something resembling s…

It sucks when you want to use feature that arent available however users wishes always trump site authors, we tested ask by default and it turned out more users wanted them blocked "Click here to play video" is also clear and easy to understand, not sure why you would think your users could not handle that. In future https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Permissions... may help

>We tested ask by default and it turned out more users wanted them blocked.

I was one of those users, as I have Nightly installed. I hope you don't seriously think me clicking "no" on the majority of those popups in any way equates to me saying "videos should never autoplay." -- Hell I used my own service and approved one of those dialogs for it.

You should be careful how you read into statistics: there is a huge difference between "90+% of users said no to the autoplay prompt" and "90+% of users think autoplay should be off by default."

>Not sure why you would think your users could not handle that.

I don't think, I know, because I've fielded the numerous reports from users who thought my service was broken when Google[1] decided their "media engagement index" was too low and the videos weren't starting automatically for them.

It is objectively a bad experience for my users if they all have to manually click play and their streams are randomly offset from the host and they see people "spoiling" things in chat. The reality is that many of my users would sit on the page, looking at a play button (that wasn't there before), wondering why people are already talking about the video in chat. "Has it started yet?" "When does it start?" "I think I'm buffering", etc.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

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