Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#201

Post by StavrosK » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #188

an4rchy wrote: post #159

Does this include Netflix? It's been getting really annoying to have random videos your mouse is on, as you scroll, start playing automatically.

Indeed, the autoplay feature of Netflix is insanely intrusive. How are you supposed to let menus sit while you do something else, or even just read details.

I noticed something that struck me as an extremely dark pattern the other day. I was in the Netflix menu on my TV, and I loaded a show and was hovering over the "play" button, but figured I'd leave it there and not start it yet.

A few seconds later, the video fades in and the episode starts playing! I didn't even notice it and kind of started watching the episode, but then realized that I hadn't actually started it myself!

Netflix almost roped me into watching an episode even though I didn't explicitly ask them to, and that seems very manipulative to me.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#202

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#203

Post by geofft » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

anoncake wrote: post #180

geofft wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having them be proper applications would be a huge problem for the security and therefore the computing autonomy of the average person. The fact that you don't generally download unsandboxed, unsigned apps from the internets any more (and don't run shrink-wrapped apps from the local CompUSA that are full of C string parsing vulnerabilities, either) is one of the most meaningful accomplishments in computer security in…

Thats a false dilemma. You can have sandboxing without running pseudo-applications in a document viewer and without walled gardens. > (Also, what makes you think that the developers of bloated JS apps won't make bloated desktop apps?) Nothing. Its possible to create garbage desktop apps. But its impossible to create non-garbage web apps.

> You can have sandboxing without running pseudo-applications in a document viewer and without walled gardens.

Please expand on this claim. What is a "pseudo-application" and what is a "document viewer"? In particular, how does having an app runtime outside a "document viewer" accomplish the goals you would like to see?

> Its possible to create garbage desktop apps. But its impossible to create non-garbage web apps.

Please expand on this claim. I've seen tons of non-garbage web apps.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#204

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

anoncake wrote: post #166

JoshTriplett wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are applications. They run in a safe sandbox in the browser, rather than being all-powerful programs running directly on the system. They allow nuances of trust ("I trust this application with the data I'm giving it") rather than absolute trust ("I trust this application with access to my entire system and all my data").

Proper applications follow OS UI conventions, they appear in the task bar, are launched from the application launcher etc. Proper applications can also be sandboxed, though Spectre makes it a bad idea to run untrusted code anyway.

> Proper applications follow OS UI conventions

(I'm going to ignore the use of "proper application" instead of "native (non-web) application"; it isn't helping your argument.)

Native applications can choose whether they follow UI conventions or not; many games don't, for instance. Web applications have the same choice; they can use native controls provided by the browser, and I certainly agree that well-behaved web applications should if they don't have a good reason to do otherwise (e.g. use standard form controls for native look-and-feel and better integration/interaction).

> they appear in the task bar

So do progressive web apps (PWAs).

> are launched from the application launcher

PWAs are as well. (Likewise for many other aspects of integration with the rest of the system.)

> Proper applications can also be sandboxed

But there aren't yet standard mechanisms for that (outside of mobile platforms), and you can't necessarily trust that an application will sandbox itself. Current sandbox mechanisms mostly get used by applications to protect against exploits, not for users to protect themselves against applications.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#205

Post by benj111 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

Bekwnn wrote: post #141

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.

I already use noscript. So many websites work at 100% and load 2x as fast with only 1/3rd of scripts allowed.

Unfortunately many silently break, ok for news sites etc, not so good for your bank website.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#206

Post by StavrosK » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

It pops up a window when you visit the site, asking if you want to allow sounds. You just click "allow".

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#207

Post by sametmax » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

You can whitelist.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#208

Post by bzbarsky » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #42

Whenever Firefox is automatically updated through my package manager, any open instances refuse to load any new pages or tabs until I restart Firefox . Needless to say, this is absolutely infuriating when I'm in the middle of something important. Does anyone know how to disable this feature?

This change was made because opening a new tab or loading a new page can start a new renderer process. The way things work right now is that this is started by running the on-disk renderer process executable.

If you've updated your installation, the new renderer will be the new version, but the parent (ui) process is still the old version. The protocol the two use to talk to each other is not fixed, and messages will start looking malformed. Malformed messages are handled by immediately terminating the process, because otherwise security guarantees go out the window.

So the upshot was that you'd get various crashes in the "I updated Firefox and then kept using it" situation. I've run into a bunch personally, and there is _lots_ of crash reporting data on this. The crashes are not OS-specific; they just have to do with whether changes happened to the IPC protocol.

A "proper" solution would be for the parent process to not use the on-disk version of the renderer to launch new renderers. There's work ongoing to make that possible, but in the meantime the crash volume due to this problem was high enough that the mitigation you see was put in place.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#209

Post by Someone1234 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #197

Is there a whitelist though? Because while I dislike an unexpected video autoplaying in a news article, there are sites where I want and expect a video to start without pressing anything, such as Youtube

Yes.

Options -> Privacy & Security -> Block Websites from automatically playing sound -> Exceptions (Allow/Block)

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#210

Post by tehlike » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

thatfunkymunki wrote: post #169

ceejayoz wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email clients, sure. Word processors? Only if you're requiring something like Markdown. Video chat seems right out, unless you're permitting a Flash solution, which would be severely cheating.

He's not talking about cancerous in-browser webapps. He's talking about actual clients.

You mean clients i can hardly update, and most often clunky as well? I dont see the improvement.

I can use web apps on any platform without waiting for the company to do it.

I refuse to install apps on my devices.