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Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#191

Post by droobles »

skrebbel wrote: post #182

My company makes pluggable chat software. I'm sad about this development, because it means that we can't audibly notify users anymore when someone writes a message to them. I wonder whether there's a way around that, but I don't see it.

I've been messing around with the Web Audio API lately and the message Firefox leaves is that it will still work as long as the user initiates the sounds loading, not the page. So if the user opens your chat or maybe interacts with your page in a way that indicates they've given you permission to play sounds then you're good.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#192

Post by bzbarsky »

Sharlin wrote: post #139
fimdomeio wrote: post #123

From the last 3 or so versions Firefox performance on my retina mac is indistinguishable from chrome (from a humam perspective not looking at ram cpu usage), so I'm very happy to be using firefox full time once again. At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. Does not happen any more.

> At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedi…

The "plugin-container" executable is used for all sandboxed processes on Windows. That started out as plug-ins, but now includes web renderers.

So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs.

It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users....

On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#193

Post by droobles »

tehlike wrote: post #143
anoncake wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cant ban just the bad Javascript, a browser cannot distinguish it from the good. And overall, Javascript does more harm than good.

Citation needed. I dont believe gmail would be as useful eithout javascript, docs wouldnt really be possible, i dont think i could video chat with my family without extensions, and so on. Installing apps is really not aomething i want. I am trying to keep apps on my phone low for a reason, browser is actually perfect for most of what i do.

The main Gmail app would not work. There is an html only Gmail and I use it all the time!

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#194

Post by JohnFen »

snaky wrote: post #184
anoncake wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cant ban just the bad Javascript, a browser cannot distinguish it from the good. And overall, Javascript does more harm than good.

> We cant ban just the bad Javascript Well, technically it's possible, and even some parts of the script could be allowed to run or not. > a browser cannot distinguish it from the good But the user can. And the machine could help, thanks to machine learning.

> But the user can.

How? I don't think that users even agree what consists of "good" and "bad" JavaScript.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#195

Post by rebelwebmaster »

k_sze wrote: post #118
rebelwebmaster wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could reduce out-of-memory crashes if fewer sites are sharing the same process.

I don't quite understand how that can be possible. At the end of the day, you're still aiming to load, in FF 66, just as many tabs as in FF pre-66. FF's total memory usage should be about the same whether you're using 4 processes or 8. Sure, if each FF process now takes care of fewer tabs, then when OOM does happen, the FF processes have a lower OOM score and are less likely to get killed. But something will get kill…

On 32-bit Windows, processes have maximum address space limitations which can be easily hit by web browsers. Having more content processes makes it less likely that any particular one will hit that limit. Note that content process OOM crashes are the #1 source of crash reports Firefox gets (and you can see plenty of other OOM crashes in that list further down too):

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrashers/?product=Firefox...

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#196

Post by mushufasa »

brink wrote: post #153
jessemillar wrote: post #129

> With this update, Firefox is introducing scroll anchoring, which ensures that you’re not going to bounce around on the page as these slow-loading ads load. While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.

Same. Have you ever tried to click a link only to accidentally click something else because the page won't stop loading? It's infuriating.

this has been happening to me recently on Google search, as cards load with info about the top results.

Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.

Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#198

Post by Someone1234 »

skrebbel wrote: post #182

My company makes pluggable chat software. I'm sad about this development, because it means that we can't audibly notify users anymore when someone writes a message to them. I wonder whether there's a way around that, but I don't see it.

Some of your competitors have been using it for a fake "ding" sound and a generic message when you visit a site. So while I sympathize a little, it is for the greater good.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#199

Post by falcor84 »

peterlk wrote: post #170
amelius wrote: post #160

Why not just block the audio by default? I don't care about the video, because any hostile website could still generate video by using gifs, or by playing a sequence of image frames using JavaScript.

Because breaking sites like Soundcloud and Youtube by default seems like an overreaction to the abuse of auto-playing sound

To me it seems to be a very reasonable reaction to a terrible situation. As long as it's easy to whitelist a domain, I'm very happy about this development.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#200

Post by morningmoon »

diminish wrote: post #130

At the end unless Firefox doesn't block JavaScript, it won't have much effect. Actually it's also time to ban JavaScript after horrendous front end frameworks made simple page loads slow, energy and time consuming.

Agreed. I have yet to find a single use-case that can't be done without JavaScript, with the exception of chat. Like audio and video, chat could have easily been another HTML widget provided by the browser (imagine, standard declarative chat across the web!).

I built my last webapp entirely without JavaScript. Users constantly praise how fast it is. There's no bugs with the back button. It's accessible out-of-the-box. Form inputs work correctly out-of-the-box. It's clear when data is being loaded/submitted and when it's not (since that's already built into the browser). And on and on and on...

JavaScript is the worst thing to happen to UX, privacy, speed, caching, and accessibility. So much of the web's UX is broken because of JS. It's depressing because it was all unnecessary. We went from a standard declarative interface shared by all websites to an "anything goes" black box runtime.

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