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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

#363

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…

The iPhone search has been driving me crazy as well. Another one that always gets me is pressing a number in the recent calls list just after another call was ended.

You're absolutely right. The recent calls issue happens way too often. Nothing worse than calling your boss at 2am when you meant to call your wife or vice-versa...

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#364
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've pretty much entirely gone back to pirating because of those fucking auto-play trailers they have now (and this is on the Roku app, where Firefox wont' help me).

Looking for a specific thing is such a pain. Is it on netflix? Nope. 2 minutes loading the prime video app. Is it on there? Yeah, 3.99 for the privilege of streaming for a couple days. 2 minutes checking hulu. Nope. 2 minutes loading the HBOGO app. Not there either. Turns out, it was on showtime, the one service I don't have access to. If its not there I'll pirate without hesitation. The only inconvenience is the tim…

Something like Plex might help with the HDMI cable issue.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#365

> 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.

Sad this is even necessary. Progressive loading is a relic of a bygone 28.8 kbps era. Connections are fast enough is where you should be able to draw everything into an off-screen buffer and display the completed page in one go.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#366

So what's the list of browsers now that have autoplaying blocked or have that feature planned?

Safari has it and is doing it much better, because it blocks both video and audio autoplay. I just tested it on Firefox 66 and I'm very disappointed. It blocks only audio and... it's broken anyway. On one page the first video was audio muted (great!), but then the second video came after the first one finished playing and it was suddenly unmuted! The tab was inactive and suddenly the sound came from it. Until fixed,…

Which site?

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#367

I have been using Firefox on macOS for a while but firefox is not well-integrated with the OS. Scrolling, downloading files, playing video/audio and many more have different convention from Safari/Chrome. Also, I am trying to avoid using Firefox on battery because it is a killer.

I've been using FF on macOS for the past year and haven't noticed any problems with the battery. I'm not sure what the problems are with scrolling, downloading, or playing media are either to be honest.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=909760 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1104146 are the issues for downloading which are 4 and 6 years old.

Chrome and Safari support keyboard multimedia keys to play/pause video and audio which firefox does not. Picture in Picture is not available on Firefox.

Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.

https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html mentions about excessive power consumption on webrender.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another solution is just to wait until computers and networks are 100 times faster than they were 10 years ago, so that a page and its pieces load instantly. Oh, wait. That speed-up already happened, and yet websites are actually slower than they were 10 years ago. I guess there is no advance in hardware that software cannot overcome.

Networks are thousands of times faster in bandwidth, but they don't have thousands of times less latency. Software is actively working to overcome the limitations of latency, such as with HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and TLS 1.3.

For a page load, why should latency matter once you get below 50 ms? The problem isn’t latency, the problem is that the software stack makes tons of round-trip requests to display some text and images. The modern web makes X11 seem like it was designed by a demoscene coder.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#369
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?

As others may have mentioned, it's because the binaries are overwritten. But Ubuntu used to ship a plugin with their builds, xul-ext-ubufox, that would detect this and prompt for restart on upgrade, but for some reason it's disabled now according to the package description:

  This package currently ships no functionality, but may be used again in
  the future to display a restart notification after upgrading Firefox.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#370
post #48

This bit is also somewhat surprising/interesting: > Improved performance and reduced crash rates by [doubling web content loading processes from 4 to 8 [1] From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency. I think there's supposed to be a link to more explanation or the relevant ticket, but it looks like they forgot to actually add the link. Can…

>> From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency.

Mozilla/Firefox is writing more stuff in Rust, where concurrency is easier to do right. I'm not sure how much that effort has improved the reliability so far but it's happening:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation

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