Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#511

Post by yogthos » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:22 AM UTC

sercand wrote: post #367

yogthos wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conventi…

Ah I see, I guess I don't use any of that stuff myself. I tend to move between macOS and Linux, so I don't get too attached to system specific shortcuts. That said, I really don't see any of these problems as being show stoppers, and I haven't noticed much difference in battery usage between Chrome and FF.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#512

Post by rayiner » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #474

rayiner wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People on lower quality connections (high packet loss/roundtrip) eat a lot of delay on page loads because the average site connects to like 20+ servers and the browser has to spin up a bunch of http connections. Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable.

> Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable.

JavaScript is not “unavoidable,” it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#513

Post by crazygringo » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #34

Vinnl wrote: post #28

> Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the top of the page That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to…

Wouldn't it be nice if browsers or servers could reserve that space even if it's not loaded? Like "this is going to be a 500x200 image so let's load 500x200 pixels worth of empty space until it's fully loaded" and avoid jumping.

Plenty of sites already do that with images.

The problem is mainly with ads, when 1) there may or may not be an ad available, and 2) you're allowing the ad height to be dynamic, to allow for greater possible inventory.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#514

Post by baroffoos » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #460

bobbyi_settv wrote: post #414

I love that we continue to refer to private/ incognito browsing as something mainly used "when you’re planning a surprise party or gift".

I mean I use it for personal stuff at work, for disposable browser environments for testing frontend content and bugs and for quickly handling AWS environments ... By far my use of incognito for mundane tasks outstrips its use for porn.

I used to do that but now I mainly use firefox container tabs. My main usecase being able to use the website as an admin and as a regular user at the same time.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#515

Post by nydel » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

excited to see some of these features in a future waterfox release; things like integrated Pocket are the most major annoyances to me.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#516

Post by Razengan » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

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.

It's one of those features that you'd think must be inherent in everything since forever but can't believe that we still don't have it by now.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#517

Post by Razengan » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:51 AM UTC

codebolt wrote: post #342

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…

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.

This has happened too many times to me.

I often put the phone in my pocket after a call without pressing the sleep button, so the screen stays active, causing me to unknowingly "butt dial" random numbers, sometimes talking to other people while a confused/mischievous person on the call is listening in...

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#518

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:51 AM UTC

erichurkman wrote: post #464

brink wrote: 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.

Or all of the sites that have adopted a 'card' view. Gannett sites all have this terrible UX that if you click in the white space around an article, it closes the article and takes you to the home page. [0] Accidental clicks on white space shouldn't do anything! [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...

Accidental clicks on white space shouldn't do anything!

They are racking up click-throughs.

Advertisers pay just as much for accidental clicks as intentional ones, so the site operator is incentivized to generate as many as possible. Being the dumbest morons ever to mo a ron, the advertisers don't understand that they're the marks in this particular con game.

Eventually they will get tired of paying for worthless clicks, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#519

Post by k_sze » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

rebelwebmaster wrote: post #195

k_sze wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, so you mean that on 32-bit Windows, processes (can) have an address space that is smaller than the sum of physical RAM + page file? I didn't know that.

It makes sense then.

Re: Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances

#520

Post by mirrorlake » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 3:34 AM UTC

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #471

bobbyi_settv wrote: post #414

I love that we continue to refer to private/ incognito browsing as something mainly used "when you’re planning a surprise party or gift".

My main use of incognito mode is to prevent my YouTube recommendations from being filled with music videos or fringe news bullshit

I’m saddened by this aspect of YouTube whereby you’re afraid to explore the site without tanking your recommendations. I wish there was a site that focused on finding YouTube videos in a more focused way rather than some rogue ML algorithm that decides to spam you with weird topics. I don’t feel like I have any control over my YouTube account anymore.