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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

#251

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.

What about using the notifications API? Seems a cleaner way than autoplaying sound in any case.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#252

> 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.

> I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.

This has been my #1 gripe with web sites since pretty much the dawn of time. Finally!

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#253
post #153

> 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.

Do you mean like this? [0]

[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#254
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Newegg has been particularly bad with this in the past. Looks like they have fixed it now, but used to be that it would take a 0.5-2 seconds for their advertisement to load above the "search within", "only show newegg products, I'm not looking for an amazon experience", and "sort by" fields. Go to click on those (I always prefer "only newegg" instead of the default "all sellers"), and half the time I'd end up clickin…

>and half the time I'd end up clicking on the advertisement when it loaded.

Just as planned

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#255

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.

> Word processors? Only if you're requiring something like Markdown. You havent heard of LibreOffice?

> You havent heard of LibreOffice?

Don't be disingenuous. The thread's about Firefox and JavaScript. It's quite clear @tehlike wasn't talking about native desktop apps, but web apps.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could be proper applications instead.

That has downsides of its own. For example, url sharing / deep linking goes out the window. I can't share what I'm looking at in macOS' Maps.app like I can on the Google Maps website, pure downgrade. I also don't want to download an application for everything. Very few things deserve a permanent spot on my computer. I have much less control over desktop apps than I do a website. Or look at macOS' News.app. Another do…

> I can't share what I'm looking at in macOS' Maps.app like I can on the Google Maps website, pure downgrade.

But you can? For example, https://maps.apple.com/?ll=36.103117,-103.901438&spn=0.00098...

> Or look at macOS' News.app. Another downgrade from reading news in a browser tab. It has no tabs. There's no right-click. It implemented its own back button. It only supports the few news sources that come preinstalled on it. I can't add my own. Why would I prefer this?

You shouldn't; you should be annoyed that Apple shipped this and demand that they give you better.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#259

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

This change will already do that; Firefox doesn't whitelist sites by default.

My personal preference would have been to mute tabs by default rather than blocking autoplay:

- Sites can't detect a muted tab with JS, so they can't use it for tracking or block services behind it.

- Nothing would break. Firefox did a pretty good job of minimizing the potential breakage from this change, but there are still edge cases and some weird logic that's required to address them. A muted tab is no different than you unplugging the speakers from your computer. It'll never cause a Javascript error.

- It's simpler from a user perspective. You can already mute a tab. Why do we need another control that's meant to fulfill the same purpose?

The counter-argument is that blocking autoplay is actually about saving data, but in reality:

- The restrictions are trivial to bypass, since you can just start playing after the first user gesture/action.

- Muted videos are still allowed to autoplay.

So if you're trying to save data, it would still be a lot better to just have an option to block audio/video entirely, not just of the autoplaying variety.

As far as I can tell, Mozilla basically got kind of railroaded into this implementation because that's what Google did, and that set the general narrative. Mozilla ended up with a better implementation than Google, but this is still one of those restrictions where I feel like 2-3 years from now we're going to look back and say, "yeah, this wasn't really thought through all the way."

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#260
post #67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a great solution, if everybody used the same screen size.

Not sure why you're downvoted. It's a real problem. It would help if it would be possible to set an aspect ratio on the img tag, so that when it's scaled via CSS or whatever, it would maintain the aspect ratio of the loaded image despite it not being loaded yet.

It's possible and well-known: https://css-tricks.com/aspect-ratio-boxes/. Also, for images, there is the simpler solution of specifying real width/height in the img tag, then use CSS with "max-width: 100%; height: auto" or anything similar.
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