Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#351

Post by jeltz » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

droobles wrote: post #191

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.

That is a bit annoying for my usecase (playing a sound whenever a team scores a goal) where the users enable it manually but it is remembered with a cookie. Right now we just do not remember their sound preferences in Safari, which just like Firefox requires user interaction.

So some responsible users are affected by this change, but it is also a necessary change due to too many abusers. This is why we cannot have nice things.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#352

Post by zeusly » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #339

darkstar999 wrote: post #239

I've switched over to Firefox on all devices. It's especially useful on Android because I can use uBlock and other useful extensions, where Chrome doesn't have any. The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit tab, and then type in a search query.

By far the biggest annoyance with firefox on mobile is that when you open the browser, are presented with all your tabs, and a toolbar which only searches your open tabs rather than just being a toolbar that you can type in a website, or a search term, or also search amongst your open tabs.

that's not how my firefox on android behaves, I can search just fine from the new tab page

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#353

Post by vinay_ys » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

These are the features still on my wishlist: - First-class portable password manager and built-in support for pkcs11 SC - security device that's not buggy, - fingerprinting protection, - first party isolation, - default fonts, - better zoom behavior, - built-in ublock origin ad-blocker.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#354

Post by airstrike » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

Scramblejams wrote: post #313

airstrike wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens to me every single day on the Windows 10 start menu and on my iPhone using the swipe-down search on the Home screen. Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a…

Had the same problem on my iPhone. I turned off Siri for app search (Settings / Siri & Search / Suggestions for Search) and now the results are instant. (And local to my phone, so no internet-sourced results, but I’m fine with that.) How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the…

Try slowly typing in "Performance" in the Windows 10 start menu and watch the top result flip around pretty much at each key press...

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#355

Post by johncolanduoni » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #82

philg_jr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple things. 1. Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? I dunno, I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update. 2. Firefox has a pretty reliable "Restore Previous Session" feature that works well. I have also been known to throw a SIGTERM at Firefox and just let it prompt me when I start it again for the "So…

>Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? Updates are automatic every day. >I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update How often does that happen? It doesn't seem reasonable to put off security updates that have already been fixed and are simply waiting to install. Firefox is the only program I've run into w…

The reason it’s different is that it (like Chromium) runs a multi-process sandbox to try to isolate your system from vulnerabilities in the JS runtime or renderer. It’s possible to handle updates while new tabs are created gracefully in that case, but far from trivial.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#356

Post by 0xffff2 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:36 PM UTC

fxfan wrote: post #235

Now please ship ublock origin by default.

Why? What would be better about uBlock Origin if it was integrated? Furthermore, it wasn't that long ago that we all used AdBlock Plus, and then uBlock. If we integrate the current flavor of ad blocker, what happens when we want/need to move to something else?

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#357

Post by 29jm » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

IronBacon wrote: post #229

chronogram wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that it looks like the Windows version: title bar and tabs are together. The close and minimise buttons are to the side of the tabs. I believe this isn’t enabled for KDE Plasma. If you like a separate title bar like the old version of Firefox, then use the hamburger menu, choose “customise” and check the box for the title bar.

Unfortunately, it doesn't pick up the actions associated, for example, to the "double-click" or "middle-click" or at least not on my desktop. Someone knows if it's customizable in the config menu, searching the obvious "titlebar" reports only two not useful entries?

It is, it's a checkbox at the bottom left of the "Customize" panel.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

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Post by phkahler » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #95

megous wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases you want to set one size and let the other calculate itself based on the aspect ratio of an image. And this is not know prior to loading and can't be specified in any other way. So you get jumpy behavior during load on most responsive websites and slow connections. It's hard to fix in JS too.

If only there was a way to know the aspect ratio of an image at the time of website authoring...

But wouldn't that require people to know what they're putting on their web site?

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

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Post by maxaf » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #340

maxaf wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like what Slack does for GIFs: there's some (not sure if configurable) size threshold above which the GIF won't auto-expand. This is something browsers could do in general.

That assumes the browser can know the image's content-length before loading the whole image, which unfortunately isn't always possible.

Yeah, that's fair, but is likely a corner case. How often do you see a finitely sized resource that doesn't get returned with a Content-Length response header? If push came to shove, a browser could simply stop reading & close the connection after consuming a certain number of bytes. GIFs are sequential things anyway, aren't they? I don't remember that detail.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

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Post by benj111 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #325

benj111 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit, I can see that. Would you want a reddit where every embedded video in a thread auto played though? I'm guessing our disagreement is over who has final say over display of content? I would say the client, you would say the server (or creator)? Is that fair?

The user should be able to make the client do whatever they want, but a blacklist for autoplay sounds a lot better to me than a whitelist. It harms the creative potential of things when they're limited by default and most users aren't going to manually add your site to a whitelist. It wouldn't even be so bad if the website could just request autoplay permissions the same as it requests permission to know your locatio…

What about banning autoplay on background tabs, with a blacklist for abusers on the focused tab?

The problem with blacklists is that they default to letting bad things through if not maintained. But yeah it would be nice to think that we still have a web where the blacklist would be less unwieldy than the whitelist.